Moo's Mid Life Crisis: Grand Canyon

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I took by far the most photos here of any location we've been to on this trip. Whittled down it's still 150 pics! Looking back on them, a lot are difficult to tell apart, and the camera really does nothing at all to capture the incomprehensible scale of the canyon.

We had a day and a half here. On the first half day a number of us took an hour long helicopter flight over the canyon to get a birds eye view of it. For me, this was funded by the going away collection for me by my lovely friends and colleagues back at Perforce. I was thinking of you all as we soared over the Colorado River in the sunshine. Hope you are all well and everything is going smoothly back there behind your desks!

The ride itself was filmed and recorded, and we collectively got a copy of it. If you'd like to see, you can find it here. It's unedited, and there is a chunk at the start and end that is just going over the forest to get there which may be pretty dull, but worth skipping through!

What I did:

So, helicopter flight in the afternoon of the first day, the next day we had entirely to ourselves to explore as we saw fit. I think all of us decided to trek various distances down into the canyon using the Bright Angel Trail. Ian got the furthest, all the way to Plateau Point, but he's ex-RAF and a nutter. Quite a few got as far as the 3 Mile Resthouse. I decided after an hour of climbing steeply down that I had done my duty, and by the time I got to the bottom of the first big white layer I was satisfied and headed back up to explore the rim.

The bottom of the first white layer - it's a really hard line

You can see the white layer on the far side of the canyon, and how not far down I got.

Back at the top I got the bus to The Abyss and then walked back to the village, having lunch along the way.

View from my lunch spot

View of my lunch spot.

After walking back to the village, I took the bus out to the visitor centre, then walked back round the rim to the geology center for a read up on how the canyon was created and to see sunset.

Scenery:

It's huge. Mindbogglingly so. At it's widest part it's 18 miles wide, and it's over 200 miles long. To walk from the south rim down to the river is about 6-8 hours worth of hiking, usually in baking heat with no water sources. The days we were there the air was lovely and clear and my brain just couldn't really comprehend how far away the stuff I was looking at was. I won't overload this post with photos of scenery. If you want to see more you can look at the google album for the entire trip here.

Wildlife:

Grand Canyon was particularly good to me with wildlife.

Various elk, including one in town at night

A few Red Tailed Hawks

A grasshopper with a deathwish.

White Breasted Nuthatch. No this photo is not upside down, the bird is. It seemed to defy gravity not caring which way was up or if it was on a vertical or horizontal surface.