The journey to the South Rim Grand Canyon didn't take as long as we thought, a mere 2 hours. After a night of lightning, thunder and heavy rain we were glad to finally see the sun again. However, the very nice Park Ranger on the entrance broke the news gently telling us with a smile that a snow storm was on its way!!!

It was pretty cold but we thought nothing could be as cold as Yellowstone, so we checked into our campsite and then headed out to the Desert View watch tower, this gave us spectacular views over the Canyon. After that we walked from the visitor centre to Bright Angel Lodge along the rim trail. The views were again great and quite different to the views we had from the North side.

We both went to bed that night expecting to wake to a dusting of snow. Instead we were woken at about 3am to heavy hail which lasted all night. At 5am and it was so bloody cold that we got up and drove to Bright Angel Lodge for early morning coffee!

The previous day we had registered with Phantom Ranch in a last ditch attempt to get accomodation in the Canyon so that we could do the 10 mile hike down. There were not many people waiting so we were quite hopeful, but we missed out on a place by one person. Nikki had a room but I didn't so we spent the next few hours trying to hire a tent only to find that all the campgrounds down there were full. We admitted defeat and instead we did a bit more rim walking up to Hermits Rest.

Not wanting another freezing night in the van we headed to Vegas and its warm desert surroundings!!