USA - Grand Canyon Filling Up With Water

July 16

Hello everyone!

The blogs are going to come thick and fast now, with a lot happening between today and the end of my two-week bus trip to Denver. We’re starting with probably the biggest thing of all…

The view over the at-that-point dry Grand Canyon

View of the canyon from the southern rim

That’s the Grand Canyon. It’s called that because the river that runs through it, now known as the Colorado, used to be called the Grand River. It is a word that does work well in explaining its size. You could also go for ‘incomprehensible’. 

The process of forming the Grand Canyon
may have started up to 70 million years ago

The different colours show the different types of rock

Incomprehensible in scale. One mile (1600 metres) deep. Up to 18 miles (29 km) wide. 277 miles (446 km) long. Driving from the south rim, where we went, to the north rim takes almost five hours.

A canyon in Tibet, called Yarlung Tsangpo,
is less renowned but deeper

It was made a national park in 1919

Incomprehensible in age. The canyon’s oldest known rock, the Elves Chasm Gneiss, is 1,840 million years old. Two fifths of the time back to the Big Bang. The canyon itself may have started forming up to 70 million years ago. Erosion has led to the formation of peaks, ‘temples’ and cliffs of staggering scale and colour.

A very old rock

The other part that was incomprehensible? The weather. But I’ll come back to that.

It's 280 miles from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon's South Rim

The Big Red Bus headed east out of Las Vegas early in the morning, crossing the Colorado River to take me into a new state: Arizona. One which only became a state in 1912, almost 60 years after the territory’s purchase by the United States from Mexico.

There are 28 people on my trip

The river ends in the Gulf of California

We made a brief stop in the ‘town’ - it’s a street - of Seligman. This was part of Route 66, the old path across America. One that’s not that old, actually - the concept is from the 1920s, reached its heyday in the 1950s when car culture took over, before dying a death with the construction of interstate highways around it in the following decades.

The original Route 66 went from Chicago to Santa Monica

The Roadkill Cafe's menu - legit
until the 1990s, they claim

The man below was part of a successful drive to put Seligman as one of the points on a ‘Historic Route 66’ trail. He is a barber, now 98 years young, called Angel.

He worked as a barber until 93 years of age

I don't need a shave...yet...

Seligman’s other claim to fame is that is partly the basis for the fictional setting of the hit movie Cars. This gets played on a lot considering it’s just one street, with replicas of the cars on the side of the road. And a toy car that fits in the palm of your hand, available in a souvenir shop for $25.

The town in Cars is called Radiator Springs

Mater: looking rusty

Note the sunshine. This continued as we traversed towards the southern rim of the Grand Canyon for about 2pm. Knowing the strength of the Sun, I applied suncream whilst looking at a trail that would take me into the canyon. Not anywhere near the bottom - that’s an all-day trek that the national park describes as ‘strenuous’, and my ankle isn’t 100% yet - but enough to begin to feel the canyon’s enormity at least.

Temperatures in the canyon can exceed 120F, or 49C

Our trip leader had mentioned a 30% chance of rain at some point in the day so a coat was stashed at the bottom of my bag. I took in one breathtaking view, slugged some water and got going down into one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World.

Some people take mules into the canyon

An arch on the trail

I was taking a route called Bright Angel Trail, knowing I had two-and-a-half hours before the bus left me in the wilderness. The views were stunning. It’s a shame that the smoke from the massive wildfire currently ravaging the northern side of the canyon is flowing through the gap.

The coloured rock is called strata

The fire is called Dragon Bravo and has
caused massive damage on the northern side

About 15 minutes into walking, a few drops of rain started falling. Not enough to cause an issue, and it actually kept the temperature down. At this point some thunder began to gently reverberate around the sheer cliffs and along the jagged valleys.

The trail, going out and back, is almost 16 miles

After about 30 minutes, it became heavier. Not torrential, and intermittent, but enough for me to decide to swap my top for that raincoat. The thunder was still there but no lightning as yet.

Lower clouds, in addition to smoke from the fire

The point at which I turned - a good decision

I turned around after 40 minutes. I hadn’t planned on going much further than that, and was thankful as the rain became steadier. Some hardy souls were coming down but most, myself included, were heading up. I don’t know what the protocols are for thunder in a canyon but didn’t want to do anything silly.

Note the clothing change - it was still warm!

Returning to the start point, the rain had relented. I had a bit more than an hour before we were leaving, so decided to start walking around the rim.

Still stunning

Maricopa Point

Turns out this was something silly. For one, it was very windy. When you are wet, being whipped by wind isn’t fun. More than that, however, was the ominously loud thunder…

…and then the thing that normally precedes it came into much sharper focus. A bit more than a kilometre away from base, I saw a fork slashing horizontally on the other side of the canyon. A minute or so later, I saw a fork slash vertically…on my side. Quite close. WIth an immediate roar of thunder accompanying it. 

An internet picture of lightning over the canyon

I haven’t run since the ever-so-slight ankle break I had at the end of May. Well, I ran now. Not very quickly, admittedly, but I jogged away…into a torrent of rain. After sheltering in a building where I found two others from the Big Red Bus also taking cover, the rain eased up enough for the three of us to speedwalk back to base.

There is no evidence of that rain - all of my electronics were stashed in my bag, which was hidden under my coat. I could show how sodden my trainers and socks currently are when writing this, almost two hours after the event, but no one needs that in their lives. 

Seeing the Grand Canyon is a memorable experience for anyone. This trip will be memorable for me for the wettest of reasons!

Love you all,

Matt