The rock art in the Grand Canyon had lodged itself in our brains. I knew I hadn’t dreamed it as I’d even stopped an old a guy about my age who was on the way up.
“Yes I did see that one time, but I’ve never seen it since.”
That night we Googled, mistakenly, ‘Grand Canyon Petroglyphs’. Well, that took us down one of those really weird ‘Youtube’ rabbit-holes you wished you hadn’t stumbled across, but we did find one post that confirmed that they were there, and even indicated where exactly - at the top of the trail, but high up on the canyon wall.
That was it - Eastbound would be after another visit to The Bright Angel Trail.
We got up early and headed straight to Bright Angel trailhead and probably not ten minutes later, just after the first tunnel, we looked up and there they were. They were no ‘Lascaux’, but for us they allowed us to relish the thought that we were walking a trail that had been used for the last 4,000 years.
I don’t know why it is that I remembered them at head height and now I needed a 400mm telephoto lens to see them. All of the path there looked very new, but no amount of googling could bring up a reason. Maybe those Youtubers were right and this was another forbidden thing in the Grand Canyon.
I’ll walk up and down the Bright Angel trail every day, before I ever go down that rabbit-hole.
We carried on along the South Rim Eastbound and even visited the Little Colorado River Canyon and know what?
Maybe we can do that ‘Petrified Forest’ and ‘Painted Desert’ after all.
