Friday June 28th

Today we woke up at 5:30, it’s cold outside. This is so different than the heat during the day. Today we will not be driving but explore the Grand Canyon. Joris, Petra and Dirk-jan are going for a walk. That’s why we woke up so early.

The trail leads down from the edge of the Canyon. Our trail goes 350 m down.

start trail

Canyon01

The views are beautiful.

Canyon02

We are warned by several signs for the extreme heat that is expected to day. We take a lot of water and salt snacks. Along the trail there are a lot of squirrels. As soon as you open a bag of chips, the squirrels appear and almost grab the chips from your hands.

Squirrel

At the end of the trail there is a watertap, it must be more than 40 degrees celcius down here, so the tap gives us a good chance to cool down! We cool our heads with water and refill our bottles.

As soon as we start our way up we are very lucky, some clouds appear in front of the sun. This makes the temperature drop at least 15 degrees.

The climb goes quite fast, sometimes we have to stop to catch our breaths, drink some water and enjoy the view. This is really beautiful with all the layers with different colors.

Canyon03

When we are back at the edge of the Canyon we were pretty exhausted, but that was really worth it!

Top

With this high temperatures we take our shoes off, that feels good!

HotShoes

Wearing cool flipflops, we stop at several viewpoints with magnificent views. Especially the ones with a view on the Colorado River are beautiful.

Canyon04

On our way back to the campground we drive by the National Geopgraphic Store. There we go to see a movie about the Grand Canyon in an Imax cinema, really nice to see.
Especially a flight with a helicopter through the Canyon seems great, this gives a good reason to return to the canyon in the future.

At 18.15 we are back at Inge, Dirk en Trudy. Time to drink a cool beer and tell tall stories. Tomorrow we will drive towards the Bryce Canyon.