100 years of Awesome! Park #14
I consider myself very blessed to live in an amazingly diverse state, a state that houses one of the most beautiful wonders of the world...The Grand Canyon. I've had the privilege of visiting and showing many others the majesty of this park for years, but I had not been to the Grand Canyon since I began my quest of visiting all of the National Parks.
And, as I've stated before, contrary to the opinion of others, I won't count a past visit toward my quest. I did however feel that I needed to "officially" count my visit to the Grand Canyon in the year 2019 as the park was celebrating it's centennial of 100 years as a National Park. Here's the logo and what the patch looked like:
Because I had been to this park so many times before, if I was going to make it count, I wanted to do something different and special, something I had never done before. So, I decided to go visit the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
I live in Flagstaff, a little over an hour away from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The North Rim is about 3-4 hours away. I had never seen it. Distance was one reason, but another is that, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is closed for part of the year due to difficult road access because of snow, October 15th to be exact. So, we were on a time crunch. I decided to make a trip on the last weekend of the year we could in October before the 15th.
We made a stop on the way to see the Navajo Bridge and the visitor's center there. The bridge provides a way to walk over the Colorado River. It is located just south of Lee's Ferry. We learned a lot about the history around it too. The bridge construction began in 1927. It was used for many years, but then as cars began to become bigger and heavier a new bridge was needed which was the one we drove across.
The visitor's center is beautiful and definitely worth the stop, but it was the bathroom that was the really the talk of trip. I have never seen anything like it and apparently neither had some of the other visitors at the bridge because upon exiting we struck up a conversation about it. Here were the directions on the wall in back of the toilet stall, just in case you were unsure about how to use a toilet.
Okay, with our education lesson (in more than one way) over, we were back on the road. The scenery on the way to the Grand Canyon is just beautiful by the way, I highly recommend the drive. Check it out:
At last, we made it!
The South Rim of the Grand Canyon definitely looks different from the North Rim. The North Rim has higher elevation and therefore more trees. Because of the time of year we were visiting, the colors of the aspens were amazing. There is also apparently a herd of bison that reside at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. They aren't native, they were brought there years ago and their descendants still inhabit the area today. We didn't get to see any unfortunately, but we did see plenty of "evidence" that they were there.
We were really hungry upon arriving and so we decided to have lunch at the Grand Canyon Lodge before we went exploring. What a view! The restaurant is beautiful with almost floor to ceiling windows. On the menu? An elk chili Navajo Taco and it was delicious! Please click on the photos below to see them in full scale.
After lunch we visited the Grand Canyon Lodge patio to take it all in...
As we were resting from our lunch, we plotted our next move. We decided we wanted to walk around the Bright Angel Point trail and the scenery did not disappoint.
From there, we walked down Transept Trail and Bridle Path to get to the top of the trail head that leads you down into the canyon itself. We saw a group of people coming out of the canyon. We spoke with a few of them, and discovered that they had started hiking from the South Rim that morning and were on a rim-to-rim-to-rim trip. Their plan was to spend the night at the North Rim then take the trip into the canyon again to go back to the South Rim the next day. Wow! Really ambitious! I admired their motivation, but I would be happy to just go one way, once. Someday....
For now, we decided to just hike down to the Coconino Overlook as we were running short of daylight and didn't have time to hike to the bottom of canyon on this trip. It was still fun and totally worthwhile.
It was a special day and we were so glad we made the trip and very happy I was finally able to check off the Grand Canyon!