Day 3-4: The Grand Canyon

We woke up Sunday morning stuck with the sun rising to reveal the mountains and trees of north central Arizona. Oh and our prositute neighbor at the shanty motel seems to have broken a window and poored alcohol on the Honda. Any fears of Black Canyon City were quickly dispelled/transferred upon our service station meeting with Merle and Gene and Hoss, two old prospectors and a dog that hung around decked out in six shooters and belt bandoliers. My dad of course asked them to take a picture with his unknowing son and thus we have the first appearance of me on the blog. It's worth it.

The rest of day was spent realizing that we could see the canyon by sundown. Doing so required my dad leadfooting it past most of the towns I was told to see, but when he's making time, there's nothing you can do. To be fair, we did stop by another architecture commune, known as Arcosanti, but our pre-tourtime visit made the stop quick.

If you've never seen it and have not had someone tell you before, the Grand Canyon is big. And it's hard to express in pictures the idea of a basically flat area in the middle of the woods opening up to a mile deep. We spent a majority of our time in the park staring at the infinite abyss from above, but tried the hike Monday to find a thousand more photogenic places and thousand more reasons why we should be in better shape. Ultimately, the 3 mile trail got us below most of the campers, so we trudged back up to complete the seven hour walk. I'm not saying I couldn't have done it faster without my dad, but I might have really hurt the next day if I'd run while carrying a mule as I'd originally planned.

The thing about the grand canyon that you get there through isolated roads and out of cell phone range, only to arrive in campgrounds filled with an outdoorsy league of nations. Frenchies, Swedes, Germans and other types of rich North Europeans. And Darien too right as we were leaving the park, with my amazing abilty to run into classmates on family vacations. He too was on a desert spirit journey before starting work, so I wished him luck and away we went.