Day: June 30, 2011

When we realised that we could make a simple detour to see it we thought, why the heck not!

The evening before we visited the canyon we watched the sun set over Lake Powell from a hill in Page. It was beautiful and lovely to be chilling out rather than on the road for once.

The canyon itself is incredible. The colours in the rock are amazing, especially when the sunlight comes down in beams, and the shapes the water and wind have made are stunning. It’s become a very popular destination, so the tours get a little busy.

We were driven out to the canyon in a group of covered “monster trucks” along a long sandy road, past cows trying to find grass in the dunes. We had a guide that took us through the canyon, and wasn’t shy about telling us exactly what we should be taking photos of – “you’re going to stand here and take a vertical shot”!

A) it was on route up to the other canyons and we were too lazy to drive to the South rim.

B) only 10% of visitors to the Grand Canyon go to the North rim and we wanted to be the cool kids who didn’t follow the crowd.

C) the North rim is higher and therefore cooler than the South rim so although the atmosphere is thinner and I am more likely to get burnt I will at least not be so hot whilst it’s happening.

The Grand Canyon is HUGE! It’s really hard to gauge how big it really is as the Colorado River looks soooo tiny.

We were lucky as it was a fairly clear day and we could see the distant Californian Hills on the horizon.

It’s a bit of an odd place really, the rocks are very similar to what we had already seen in Arches but far more eroded so you are left with isolated towers of rocks rather than interconnecting rock ridges and hills.

You don’t need to enter the Indian Reserve as you can see the iconic rock formations from the highway but we wanted a closer look.

Now this would have been the perfect time to have a 4×4 as the lady at the entrance looked a little doubtful that our Ford Fusion would cope with the rough unpaved road, and she was right!

Matt was my trusty copilot and he did a fantastic job at keeping me calm and not panicking as I navigated the huge pot holes…

I have to admit that on one awful bit of steep downhill road I managed to scrape the bottom of car in a pot hole not meant for anything other than monster trucks, but no major damage was done, phew!

I sadly had to come back that way and I was dreading it. The rock formations are pretty impressive when you’re closer and definitely worth the horrid road we had to drive along.