We had decided that The Grand Canyon needed at least two days and we thought we could base ourselves in Flagstaff.
‘It’s only an hour and a half’.
That’s self delusion: it’s three hours - you also have to come back ya daftie!
However, Flagstag was a great place to start on that amazing journey and so it was. Walking and ‘shuttling’ our way along the western part of the South Rim filled our senses. It’s hard to describe and I’m pretty sure there isn’t an image that can convey the granduer that overwhelmed us.
Still we took our photos and we tried to capture, at the very least, what our eyes had seen.
We will post our underwhelming results, eventually.
Thinking back to the last time that I was here in 1991, the one clear memory I had was of taking an old pony or mule trail that wound its way down the sheer face of the South Rim to the base of the canyon. I now know it was the ‘Bright Angel Trail’. The clearest memory I have is of passing some ancient pictographs that were even close enough to touch, so we set off down the trail, with my vague memory that the pictographs we sought were near the head of the trail.
With each turn and switchback we and no pictographs:
‘The next one.’
But no, we eventually we turned back, as we hadn’t intended to go this far.
Still, it wasn’t finished. As we had arranged to stay much closer to the park than Flagstaff, we could stay on until after sunset and enjoyed a brilliant astronomy session laid on by the park. It was great under those dark skys, even with the moon in it’s first quarter.
Back ‘home’, the place we had arranged wasn’t the most salubrious, but it was more than adequate and perfect as a launch for our last day at The Grand Canyon - we’d planned the ‘Scenic Drive’ along the eastern part of the South Rim.
