Places I'm Visiting: Grand Canyon and Boulder Dam

My last post about my recent trip to Dallas and the Southwest claimed Monument Valley as one of the most photogenic places on Earth. Surely the Grand Canyon, our last stop, is another. We stayed two nights in Tusayan, just outside of the National Park. Somewhere between Monument Valley and Tusayan we hit a nail that set off a tire pressure warning on the dashboard of our rented car (a Kia something). After the Grand Canyon, we had another long drive ahead of us – to catch our flight home out of Las Vegas. While we had plenty of time on our last day to catch our afternoon flight, our plans assumed driving at normal highway speeds, which would be impossible on a flat tire or using the undersized spare in the car. With worry about the last leg of our trip in the back of my mind, we set out to the South Rim of the Canyon on our first morning in Tusayan. 

We ended up walking the Canyon Rim Trail for the entire day. We parked near the Grand Canyon Visitor Center, but went straight to the rim, thinking we’d see the visitor center later (although that never happened). Following the rim, we walked the two miles or so from the Visitor Center to the Bright Angel Trailhead (from which point most people who descend into the canyon start out) by way of the Mather Point overlook, Yavapai Point and the Geology Museum, and Verkamp’s Visitor Center. We had lunch at Maswik Lodge. At the Geology Museum, I was reminded that the Canyon was formed over the course of about six million years. The opening in the Earth scoured away by the Colorado river and its sediments over those millions of years today reveals nearly two billion years of geologic time. Interestingly, the Museum points out that the top 270 million years of accumulated sediment was long ago eroded away so that the only fossils found in canyon rocks are very old indeed, all pre-dating the dinosaurs. 

After lunch, we stopped in at Hopi House (a gift shop built more than 100 years ago as a place for local Hopi Indians to sell merchandise to Canyon visitors, a function it still serves). We enquired about the shuttle service back to the main Visitor Center, but ended up walking the two miles back again, which turned out to be a good decision. As a result of walking both ways and spending the entire day at it, we got to see the canyon in morning light, in the flat light of noon, and then in the waning light of late afternoon as the face of the Canyon rapidly changes toward sunset. The sky was clear most of the day but clouds were developing by the end of the day, which somewhat reduced the display just at sunset, but, overall, we were blessed with nearly ideal conditions. 

Early in the day, I found myself looking over a railing standing next to an elderly Chinese man. We both heard a bird call. He saw it first and wordlessly pointed ahead and down a little at a bird sitting almost motion-less at the top of a tree – a bird that looked very much like one of our common California Scrubjays. But, more about birds seen on this trip in another post.

I mention the Chinese man and the bird because later on the trail he approached me with his phone to show me a short video of a hummingbird that looked like an Anna’s Hummingbird. His companion, who spoke rudimentary English, indicated the video was from China, which was puzzling as there are no Hummingbirds native to China. It may have been recorded from Chinese television. After seeing the bird in the tree together in the morning we had run into him and his friend a few times during the day, once while he was sitting dangerously close to an unprotected edge of the drop-off into the abyss. A dozen or so people die each year falling into the canyon through foolhardy actions, usually attempts to get daring photographs, although some of the deaths are suicides. 

On the walk back to the visitor center, as the sun moved lower in the sky, the shadows lengthened and the landscape took on a different character. It was remarkable how quickly the light changed. One spot in shadow a moment later was picked out briefly, as if spotlighted, and then the light would pass away into another crevice or onto another outcropping of rock. Three or four times we thought the sun had set and that the light show was over only to see a distant formation suddenly illuminated in the distance for a moment as the shallow rays of the sun found a path into the canyon again. 

We arose early the next morning to see the show at sunrise, but, because the sky had clouded over overnight, the light was not that interesting and soon we had to turn our attention to our flat tire. Happily, we learned that Park Service has its own garage right in the National Park (to serve the park vehicles, but they help out in emergencies). We headed there first thing after sunrise and they were able to repair the flat for us in less than an hour, allowing us to head off to the airport in Las Vegas at normal highway speeds and without anxiety. 

The main attraction along the way is Boulder Dam (also known as Hoover Dam). I had driven across the top of the dam before, but never seen it from the nearby Mike O'Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, which allows you to look straight down into the area in front of the dam where water exits turning turbines to generate power. It’s a bit of a climb up to the bridge walkway and it can be a little scary looking over the edge of the walkway and down at the giant crescent of concrete below (the largest dam in the world when it was completed in 1936), but it’s worth the effort. Less than an hour later, we were in Las Vegas. It took more time at the airport to return the car at the remote rent-a-car lots and then get back to the terminal than it took to get from the dam to the airport. From there, it was a short, uneventful flight home.