Grand Canyon National Park

We left Laughlin headed to the Grand Canyon for an encore of our visit there in the spring of 2005 in our rented RV. Unfortunately, while we were able to stay in the park two years ago in the rental RV, our Big Sky is just too big to fit into any of the campsites inside the park, so we had to stay at a campground in Williams, about 40 miles south of the park. We reserved a site for two nights at Williams so that we could have a full day up in the park. The Grand Canyon was just as awesome and impressive as we had remembered it from our prior visits. It is in many ways simply overpowering in its magnificence. But a corollary of being such an attractive park is that it attracts crowds, even in the off season. The trip out along the west rim by shuttle bus was influenced in part by the fact that there were hundreds of school kids on a field trip to the park, so solitude was not easy to obtain. Fortunately, the trail along the rim doesn’t attract many visitors, so we ended up finding the solitude we have come to value by taking the shuttle bus to the first stop and hiking from there along the edge of the rim to the next several viewpoints along the edge. Jo took lots of wonderful pictures, but in some ways Grand Canyon is just too big to capture in individual pictures. Next time we come to the south rim, we hope to find a place to stay closer to the park so that we can be out on the trail both early in the morning (to catch the sun rise on the western side of the canyon) as well as sunset (to catch the setting sun light on the eastern side of the canyon).

An unexpected bonus as we were taking the shuttle bus back to the village was the sight of a bobcat in the woods alongside the road. We had heard that bobcats were extremely skittish and were seldom seen by visitors, so we were delighted to have this opportunity to see one in the wild. The pictures we had seen of bobcats in the visitors’ centers at Zion and other parks made them look quite small, but this one looked quite rugged and durable, with heavy legs and big paws. Not your housecat!

We decided to treat ourselves to lunch in main dining room in the El Tovar Lodge. The lodge and its dining room date back to the early 1900s and it was awesome to see the original logs and timbers still supporting the walls and roof almost 100 years after it was built. It gives one a real feeling of the history of this place. And the food was delicious!

We have each now been to the south rim of the Grand Canyon on several occasions in the past, so our hope is next year that we can make it to the north rim before the cold and snow close it down next fall. Jo will particularly like being able to photograph the canyon formations from a different angle and different lighting conditions.