Grand Canyon

On Tuesday during our excursion to Phoenix, we drove north to the largest hole in the world, or at least North America. Perhaps the Marianas Trench is a bigger hole. I last visited the park in 2001 but Scottland hadn't been there since he was a very small child.

As usual, the place was just amazing. Before we got there, I told Scottland about my theory that it's the giant auditory nothing in one half of the world that makes the Grand Canyon so spectacular. It's not enough to see the giant hole, it's that you can really FEEL that it's there because sounds just go out and never come back.

Since we were coming up from Phoenix, our visit was limited to the south rim which is where I visited the last time. On that visit I did two thing. (1) I rode this tour bus thing between eight different lookouts over the canyon and (2) got horribly sunburned.

I managed to avoid getting sunburned by slathering myself with SPF 50 (this was a strategy I employed throughout the Phoenix trip to avoid getting burned) and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could spend 10 hours in the sun of the high Colorado Plateau within getting even a little pink.

The vehicle tour was as cool as I remember, though Scottland was correct in his observation that after a while all the points start to look the same. After the vehicular tour we took a different bus to the east end of the south village and walked the rim trail (about 2.5 miles) to where we had parked our car. I didn't do that the last time and it was a cool experience. Very different from riding from lookout to lookout.

By the time we got back to the car is was maybe an hour and a half until sunset. We had gotten lunch at the Bright Angel Lodge (and discovered that you could rent rooms and cabins at the South Village), hit the gift shop and the ice-cream shop, which helped eat up a lot of time. I wanted to drive back to Flagstaff via the east entrance of the park so we hit a couple of the lookouts you can drive to on your way out of the park.

In particular we hit Indian Watchtower, which has this replica of an old Navajo (I think) watchtower that used to be there. The view from the watchtower is really different from the rest of the south rim, in that it's right at the point where the Canyon curves north. So, in addition to being able to see up the axis of the canyon rather than across, you can also see a long way across the painted desert and can see the canyon of the Little Colorado.

After we left the Indian Watchtower we exited the park and drove through the reservation that abuts it. As usual there were lots of weird little shacks on the side of the road selling trinkets. Scottland particularly liked the one that said "Nice Indians Ahead."

The drive back to Flagstaff was really cool, as we were driving across a relatively flat expanse of grass covered land as the sun was setting was setting behind a big clumping of cinder cones (We were in the area where you'd go to see Sunset Crater), with clouds covering the sky except in the west. The grass had already dried out and gone dormant, so it was brighter in color than the clouds or the mountains and more reflective. All of these things together had the effect of making it feel like we were driving through some enormous miles high cave. It was really cool.

The rest of the drive back was relatively uneventful, though Scottland was really freaked out by the multi-thousand foot descent off the Colorado Plateau on an unlit interstate where the maximum speed is 75 mph. We pulled off the interstate at one point to look at the desert night sky. It was amazing. I've seen the Milky Way before but never as an enormous, solid belt of milky white across the sky. Very cool.