Blogs from Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, United States, North America - page 3

Let me preface this entry with.. the three of us did not go into this crazy trek without ALOT of thought and preparation. We also came to it with backpacking experience. And even though I've done crazy elevation climbs like Half Dome in a day (twice), multi-day backpacking trips and a handful of desert day hikes, the National Park Rangers still sent me a letter back stating, in summary, "your plans are nuts and extremely strenuous, are you sure? Give us a list of your experience and every backpacking item you plan to bring with you." I nervously sent back the information and they approved my permit. This was back in May, after I'd failed to obtain Phantom Ranch reservations. Many many times I went back and forth in my head, AM I crazy? Am I ... read more

It's my 26th Birthday! Celebrating in style with another road trip! This time our destination is the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. We set out early Thursday November 18th at 3:00am we made a stop at the Grand Canyon Caverns! A must see! One of the worlds rare dry caverns. We took an elevator deep down into the cavern about 250feet. They took us to each part of the cavern and explained the unique history! We loved every minute of it! We arrived at our hotel right outside the entrance of the national park at about 1:00pm We stayed at The Grand. It is a beautiful hotel with shops and a steak house that is to die for! It's also located in the center of a small town with many stores and restaurants. There are ... read more

Thursday October 20 - Today we drove away from Page early to get to the Grand Canyon. Our GPS took us offroading for about 15 miles, which was probably not the current right choice, but the only one we had, so we stuck with it, all grueling 15 miles of it. That ended up taking some extra time, so it took us longer to get there than we expected. And the national park is enormous, so we drove in, made an initial stop to look at it, but then had to drive another half hour or so in the park before we got to the visitor's center. Then we had to drive around for ages to find parking. Man oh man. From there we took a shuttle bus to the place where we would start our ... read more

Another sweltering day. 104F (37C) on the Pheew-ometer. One annoying thing is that there does not seem to be any direct public transport to and from the airport. Today we hired a car with the plan of driving to the Grand Canyon via Hoover Dam. One is a modern seven wonders of the world and the other is an extraordinary feat of engineering. The car hire outlets are not actually at the airport. Dollar, Europcar and all the others are about two miles further south. To reach these it would mean taking a cab to the airport then a free shuttle bus. To save time we took the taxi direct to the car hire place. The taxi driver was very pleasant and as soon as he knew our plans he proceeded to explain how we get ... read more

We spent the entire day at Grand Canyon South Rim. The first view was overwhelming; the size was beyond what I remembered as a kid. We took the tram to every stop on the orange which covered a couple stops along the rim and then onto the blue and red. Blue is an interior route which went to the train station (yes you can ride a train in, not a cheap option), the campgrounds, retail area that had various restaurants and shops; we also used this route to connect to red. Red by far had the best views it had 9 stops as you ascended up a long incline to finally stop at an elevation of about 7,000 feet at Hermits Rest this was once a small inn. The inn was built in 1914 and designed ... read more