A Grand Time
As you may have gathered from our posts thus far, Lisa and I seek out the quieter less traveled places. We prefer silence and solitude over selfie sticks and double decker tour buses. For this reason, we were incredibly skeptical about visiting Grand Canyon National Park, but it turned out to be a magical place. Sure there was way too much pavement for our liking, and it was definitely incredibly busy, but nothing like it is during the summer.
We arrived on Sunday and had a very early 3pm dinner so we could take a long walk on the Rim Trail at sunset. We loved watching the light shift on the walls of the canyon and even found a quiet spot where we could sit, just the two of us, and enjoy the view.
On Monday I woke Lisa up before dawn and made her a deal, if she would drive up to the visitors center she could stay in the Minnie while I went out and took photographs. There were only a handful of us standing out at Mather Point in the biting wind and cold but it was spectacularly beautiful. As the sun grew higher and the tour buses began to unload, I beat a hasty retreat to the Minnie to thaw and have breakfast before our hike down the South Kaibab Trail.
The Grand Canyon has a fair number of warning signs about the difficulty of hiking in the canyon, including a special note to “the young strong and invincible” that included information on the temperature at which your brain boils (105℉). We appreciated the park’s approach given the lack of preparedness we have seen in so many parks this summer. A park ranger on even hiked by on our descent and stopped us to check on our plan and supplies (water, food, electrolytes, etc.). Apparently, there are rangers at the Grand Canyon whose job it is to hike the canyon daily in an effort to head off problems or catastrophes before they occur. What a welcome relief!
We made it to Skeleton Point, three miles and several thousand feet down into the canyon. There we sat alone in the brilliant sunshine staring at the Colorado River several thousand feet below, with only the sound of the wind. Our hike up felt easy and we surprised ourselves by doing it in the same amount of time as our descent. We were quite proud of this given that the NPS says to estimate 2-3 times longer on the way up. As night fell, we still couldn’t stop smiling. It was a remarkable day in a remarkable place and we are grateful we got to visit.
The drive out on Highway 89 was stunning, sheer cliffs of Wingate sandstone atop the striped badlands of the Chinle formation leading us back to southern Utah. Once in Utah, the highway cuts between Vermillion Cliffs National Monument and the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Its a place of stark and stunning beauty, but it is rugged. Most of the roads to the trailheads are sandy 4WD tracks requiring high clearance, definitely not suitable for the Minnie. We hiked around some of the more accessible areas last summer and explored the Toadstools trail this time through, but will save deeper explorations for other trips.
After all the hiking and driving, we enjoyed a low key day around camp, venturing out briefly to explore Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, where a notch in the Moquith Mountains enables the accumulation of 100 foot tall dunes of orange sand, all of it eroded from the towering cliffs of Navajo sandstone that ring the area. Pretty spectacular stuff!
We sign off tonight from Zion National Park, the place where the seeds for this adventure were planted, but that my friends is a story for another day.
