Day 19  2001.12.14

We woke up in Flagstaff to 18°F weather. Brr.  As we head up the modest two-lane highway to the Grand Canyon, we see evidence that it was once a bit warmer here.
A bit too warm for my tastes, I'm afraid. Several miles of blackened trunks, marching along the road and up the mountains behind.

After many miles of flatness and increasing tree cover, suddenly we're there.  When we get to the first parking area, there are a bunch of native americans packing up their crafts from a flea-market type thing. It was only 11am! Oh well, I guess instead of shopping, we'll just have to content ourselves with...
Zowie.

Cameras cannot portray the scope of the place. They can make beautiful pictures, and jog your memories, but there's no way to show the staggering hugeness of the place without standing on the edge and looking down.  And down

And down.
At one mile deep, that's a looooong way down. If you have reaaly good eyes, the Colorado River is the tiny speck of blue-grey in the center of the picture. Where the canyons in the canyon converge.

Each of those "little" canyons (half a mile down) is larger by far than the canyon we were hiking in yesterday.

Going back to the car to find the visitors' center, I snap a photo of one of the many ravens.
They're all over the place. None of them offer an opinion as to whether things will ever happen again.

Yesterday in Sedona, we poked around in some of the tourist traps and were followed out by a rather prickly character. He seems to have joined us for the trip. We call him "Saguaro Bob".

 As we near the visitors' center, there is a traffic jam. Giant mammals are crossing the street.
Elk are enormous. About twice as tall as a white-tailed deer.

 At the visitors' center, we find a display that may help you, our gentle readers, to realize how big this whole thing is. We are already impressed.
You can see the brown "You are Here" sign at the lower edge of the canyon. If that were actually on the ground, it would be about a mile long. The Canyon is four miles across and one deep.

We stick around for a talk by one of the park rangers.  He is a geologist and very excited by his job.  I wish I could remember all of what he said. But I do remember that he said: "If you can only remember 2 words, they should be BIG, PRETTY. Other canyons may be big, or they may be pretty, but only the Grand Canyon is big AND pretty."

He also went on at length about how the GC is a paradise for geologists. They have over a billion years of rock right at the surface, nicely layered and ready to tell them things.  And best of all, there's no CRHPs to mess things up.  (That's Crummy Rock-Hiding Plants for the non-geologists.)

We then went to several more lookouts where only I braved the weather. I got lots of lovely shots, including several panoramas, but they're all collectively too big to put up.

Here's a shot of the Colorado using the full extent of my zoom.
You could just barely hear the roar of the river.

The weather was not ideal. It was cold (less than 20°F) and windy. There were some advantages to that, though.  There were very few people there. Maybe 20 or fewer at each overlook. The sky was overcast the whole time. The clouds were quite low and you could see strands drifting at different speeds.
At least I didn't have to worry about the dreaded Arizona exposure dilemma.

Outside the restaurant that night, we picked up a newspaper that seemed to indicate that our dog was following us.

We snooze again in Flagstaff. Fitfully, anyway. There seems to be several parties going on in the motel. ASU is having (or just had?) a graduation. We were lucky to get a room.

Day 19
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