Grand Canyon Day 1

We left Gallup, NM Tuesday morning and headed for the Grand Canyon. We stopped for lunch in Flagstaff, AZ, which is the city that’s closest to the Grand Canyon. It reminded me a lot of Boone. Northern Arizona University is in Flagstaff, and they have a lot of tourism as well. It’s also situated in the mountains so I felt like I was in Boone.

We thought the GPS unit was malfunctioning because it was telling us that we would arrive at the Grand Canyon in an hour after leaving Flagstaff. We knew this couldn’t be possible since it was 120 miles away. Then, when we got to the canyon, our watches didn’t match any of the clocks in the park. We finally asked a ranger and he said that Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings Time, so it was actually an hour earlier in Arizona than New Mexico even though they are in the same time zone. Why Arizona doesn’t observe DST, I have no idea, but it really threw us off.

After getting to camp and getting set up, we went to the actual canyon to hike a bit of the Rim Trail. The Rim Trail goes along the South Rim of the canyon and gives you some pretty spectacular views. The Grand Canyon has a South Rim, where we’re camping and where most everyone goes and a North Rim, which is closer to the Utah state line and is less crowded.

You can see 1,000 pictures of the Grand Canyon, but until you actually see it in person, you have no appreciation for the absolute vastness of it. Of course, we took pictures and will share them with you, but if you haven’t gone to the Grand Canyon, go as soon as you can. The shear size of it is enough to humble you, but the colors and designs will take your breath away as well.

We hiked around the South Rim Trail for about 6 miles, then hiked about a half mile down into the canyon. We were going to take a longer hike into the canyon but we couldn’t find the trailhead, and when we did, we found out that you could only go there by shuttle and the shuttle only picked up at 5:00am, 6:00am and 7:00am. Needless to say we didn’t do that hike. You can see the trail that takes you down to the canyon floor and the Colorado River from the rim and we hiked down it a little way just to see what it was like. Going down isn’t that bad, but going up is pretty strenuous. I’m glad I’ll be on a mule for our trip into the canyon. We did see a very cool natural window and tunnel on our very abbreviated hike into the canyon.

After we got back up to the rim, we decided to sit down for a while and wait on the sunset. We got a little ice cream and struck up a conversation with a couple from England. They had been walking the rim trail and showed us a picture of a snake they saw. It was a 6 foot diamondback rattlesnake, but they had no idea what it was. I think they were probably pretty lucky they didn’t get too close to it. After we said goodbye to them, we found a good place to watch the sunset and I took a little nap while Kate wrote some postcards and drew some sketches. The temperature out here is great. Even when it’s around 90, it doesn’t feel like it because of the dry air.

One thing we noticed about the Grand Canyon is that we felt like we were a little out of place. At least three fourths of the people there are from different countries. It’s a little sad that so many Americans take vacations overseas when we have something like this here at home.

The sunset was beautiful and brought out a lot of different colors in the canyon. It looks different every time you look at it from the changes in light. After the sunset, we hoofed it back to our car and went back to our campsite. We were prepared for a cold night, since last year we almost froze to death on our first night in the Gran Tetons. We both got ready to bundle up if necessary, but it turned out to be very comfortable and we had a great night’s sleep. The only downside was waking up earlier that you want to because since AZ doesn’t observe DST, the sun rises at 5:00am.

That’s about it for day 1 of the Grand Canyon. Tomorrow is the mule ride so we’re very excited about that.

~Andy & Kte