Day 4: Grand Canyon

When we visited the USA in 2022, the first stop on our road trip was the Grand Canyon. At the time it felt like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of visit, but when we were planning this year's road trip to start in Phoenix, it felt like an excellent opportunity to see the canyon for a second time. Part of the reason that we did such a long day of driving yesterday was so that we could wake up in Tusayan this morning, just a couple of miles down the road from the entrance to the national park.

Sunrise was due to be at around 6am this morning, so we set our alarms for 5 and got to the park around 05.45. There were no queues to get in at that time and no problem with finding a parking space. As we left the car park behind us, we got our first glimpse of sunrise on the horizon.

A few more steps and we had our first view of the canyon

Yep, still looked as impressive as last time we were here!

As ever, it felt like our cameras weren't doing an adequate job of capturing all the amazing colours of the sunrise.

At first, it was still quite dark ...

... but, of course, gradually it began to get brighter.

We walked to the first official viewpoint (or “scenic overlook”, as they call them in America): Mather Point. That was busy – lots of people with serious cameras and tripods!

We got the best views not from the viewpoint but just from gaps in the trees along the trail.

By 6am the sun had indeed risen as promised.

We decided to try a sunrise selfie  

It was such a beautiful view!

Once we'd finished admiring it, we set off to walk along the canyon's rim trail.

The advantage of being up this early was that it was nice and cool for hiking.

The rim trail is a really easy path which goes along the top of the southern rim of the canyon.

It's so easy that it's actually tarmac for most of the way. The first time we came, we enthusiastically turned up in walking boots. Today we didn't bother and had just worn trainers. There aren't many walks you can do in trainers and get views like this!

Once the excitement over sunrise had died down, a lot of people seemed to go back to their cars and so it was quite a peaceful walk.

We stopped every so often and tried a Grand Canyon selfie. My new selfie stick makes it really easy

The first part of the trail had info boards with all kinds of geological information. I was surprised to learn that the canyon is “only” six million years old; quite young compared to the petrified wood we saw yesterday!

As we walked along there were regular timeline markers ...

... and then examples of different types of rocks in the canyon and how long ago they were formed.

The ages of some of the rocks were mind-blowing!

As we got a bit further along the path, we had views of some of the trails which go down into the canyon. You should be able to see one zig-zagging down the canyon in the picture below.

Now that the sun was fully up, the views into the distance were incredible.

There has been a serious wildfire at the Grand Canyon this summer, but at the north rim rather than the south rim where we were.

The fire still isn't completely out, but we couldn't see any smoke on the horizon today.

Eventually we reached Grand Canyon Village, where there are various hotels and restaurants (and a big flag!).

There was a group of people here who looked like they were about to set off on a horse-riding trip.

Tim made friends with some of the horses.

After the village the trail runs more or less parallel to a road, which is served by a system of shuttle buses. There are bus stops at each scenic overlook and helpful signs along the route which let you know how far  you have to go before you get to the next bus stop.

The shuttles are really helpful, because walking along the rim of a canyon is by definition not a circular route!

This system means that you can walk along for as long as you want, then get the bus back to where you started.

They're free too and seem to run every 15 minutes, so you don't really have to plan in advance to be at a specific point for a specific time.

It wasn't even 8am in the morning yet, so we felt we'd be able to walk to a few more viewpoints.

From the next one we had a view of another trail leading down to the floor of the canyon ...

... and realised that we could see the people on horseback now making their way down.

They still had a very, very long way to go though.

People die every year from hiking down into the canyon and then struggling to hike back up.

Signs warned in multiple languages not to try and make it all the way down and back up in the same day.

We were quite happy just strolling along the rim

The trail itself is actually really pretty, with a lovely smell of pine trees. Every so often chipmunks ran out across the path, though they were too quick for us to get a photo.

We did encounter the odd lizard, but they were fairly small.

And we walked past some cactuses, which also looked rather small after our trip to Saguaro the other day.

The most exciting wildlife we saw were California condors.

These huge birds are a type of vulture and went extinct in the wild in the 1980s, before being reintroduced to parts of Arizona and Utah.

We saw lots of them gliding above the canyon, though it was hard to capture them in photos.

They really did look enormous as they flew over us.

I've lost track of how many viewpoints we'd been to by this point, but they were all spectacular.

We passed this fascinating rock which had a visible gap in it.

Shortly after that we made it to Powell Point, definitely one of the most scenic viewpoints that I remember from last time around.

I love the red rocks of the canyon that you can see from here.

The views were so good that we decided they warranted another selfie attempt

It's hard to see in the photos, but from here we could just make out part of the Colorado river at the bottom of the canyon. It's a very muddy brown colour!

It was approaching 9am now and the day was starting to heat up, so we decided to walk to one more viewpoint, then catch the shuttle back towards Tusayan so we could have breakfast.

The final viewpoint was called Hopi Point and the views from here were superb too.

Once again, we could just make out the river at the bottom of the canyon. 

It looks so small – it's hard to believe it carved all this!

I could have stood here and looked at the canyon all day, but we'd walked about six miles and food was starting to feel like an increasingly appealing idea.

I wasn't as close to the edge as it looks here!

We started walking to the nearest bus stop, from where we were able to get a shuttle back to Grand Canyon village.

From there, there was a second shuttle which took us back to the visitor centre where we had parked the car. Once back in Tusayan we had a rather belated breakfast, then got inside just before a series of thunderstorms set in for the afternoon. It was a really great morning at the Grand Canyon and I definitely don't regret coming back a second time!