Well. I decided if David was going to post something on his blog, then I better too :)
Nate and I have both lived in Arizona for almost four years and neither one of us had been to the Grand Canyon (not counting Havasupai). And it's only a few hours away from us! So we went up after work one Friday, camped, and hiked around the next day. It was a great little weekend trip. I don't love the city all the time so weekend trips are always appreciated. I feel so lucky that I married someone who loves to camp and hike as much as I do.
There are lots of cool things about the Grand Canyon, and one of them is that if you camp up there, you might get to eat breakfast the next morning with an elk (that's an elk, right? I need to take wildlife 101). We were SO CLOSE to it. There are so many people around up there it doesn't phase the animals at all. I was resting on our hike later that day and I swear a squirrel actually came up to me and posed for a picture on a rock.
Saturday we hiked down the South Kaibab Trail (we were at the south rim). The weather was fairly nice, I would recommend visiting in May because we didn't freeze at night and it wasn't too hot during the day. But still, the lower you go into the canyon the hotter it is and there is no shield from the sun. There were park rangers everywhere talking to every single person on the trail (and there were a lot of people) to make sure they had plenty of water and food. At first it came across as pushy and invasive to me but then I thought about all the people from all over the world who go there (we heard at least 20 different languages while we were there), with varying awareness of the desert and hiking in general and realized they've probably learned from sad experience that they need to do that. So, good job park rangers.
As we hiked down it was neat to see the trail dirt change color and realize we were traversing the different "layers" of the canyon.
Overall, we had a fun trip. There is a lot more to do at the South Rim than I originally thought. We want to go back and do more hiking. They have a pretty cool visitors center with a giant wall map that blew my mind. We left through the east entrance and stopped at Desert View, where you can actually see the Colorado River, and where there is a watch tower from the 1930's you can climb up.
The Canyon was beautiful. And really really big.
Nate took a cool panoramic shot with his phone.
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