We got up bright and early after a not so great night sleep! US trains like to toot their horn quite a lot, especially when passing through towns or cities, no matter what time of day or night! It would be fine, if they weren’t trying to alert everyone in a 20 mile radius!! Unfortunately for us, a train line runs behind the hotel so we were woken at least 5 times by trains, including the one we are catching in a few days!
Anyway, we got free breakfast and headed to the Grand Canyon. The weather forecast was looking good but it was still freezing cold after it dipped below freezing last night! We’re about an hour and a half from the park itself and again it was long straight roads! We found our way to the visitor centre and mastered the shuttle bus service that they run. They don’t allow cars along some of the routes, including the ones we wanted to visit, so they offer a very efficient shuttle bus which came every 5 mins or so! Marvelous! Saved us petrol as well!
Our first stop was another visitor centre to discover more about the canyon itself before venturing to Yavapi observation point. We wondered over from the bus, munching on our bananas, to see what everyone else was looking at, not quite expecting what we saw!! Speechless doesn’t come close, we were truly amazed at the view before us! Neither of us had expected it to be so big, so extensive, so jaw dropping and so..beautiful in a weird way, considering its just rock!! The layers of rock are so clear to see and they are all aligned with each other, which you can see much better in the pictures. It reminded me of a jelly mould, the rim surrounding it was so flat yet carved out in the middle was this amazing pattern/structure to be set in the jelly, if that makes sense! You can see just how flat the plateau is in the pictures also. Then there was the colours, a whole mix of different shades which identified the layers of rock.
From this point we headed west along to various lookout points, including Powell point, Hopi point, Mohave point, Pima point and Hermits Rest. At each point we saw different views of the canyon. At some we could see more of the Colorado river than at others, at one point we could hear the rapids down in the canyon. We saw a rock formation at one point which looked like a battle ship and we had the added bonus of wildlife including Elk, Javelina pigs and deer and we also saw Mule at a ranch!!
Once back at the car we headed back to see the mule close up! They were lovely and very friendly, unfortunately you couldn’t pet them or feed them, but I promised to sneak them a carrot tomorrow when I go and visit again!
We had decided that we were staying until sunset earlier in the day after reading how spectacular it can be. We made our way to Mather point, along with hundreds of other people who had had the same idea! It was dropping rapidly in temperature but when the sun did start to set, it made it worthwhile! The views were very pretty and allowed the colours of the rock to shine through even more prominently – see pics.
As the sun had set, we headed back to Flagstaff for some grub and sleep, ready to start again tomorrow!
The pictures can do the talking tonight as they have much more to tell than I do! I know I keep saying it but they really don’t do it justice! Although many of the pictures look the same, they are all different, well most of them! They are just from different angles and perhaps mean more to us having seen it for real!
As I finish this..guess what I can hear…TRAINS!! GRRR!!