Day 6: A Grand Day Out

The only item on today's agenda was ... The Grand Canyon! Since this was one of the more interesting places along our transcontinental excursion, you'll find that this page has a few more images on it than usual. As usual, you can click on any image to get a larger version of it.

It's not entirely clear that images can completely convey the size and feeling of something like the Grand Canyon. For one thing, between television and National Geographic, you've undoubtedly already seen tons of Grand Canyon pictures, and probably figure you have some idea how it looks.

If you haven't been here before, however, the really overwhelming portion of it is how bloody enormous the canyon truly is, and how very tiny the Colorado River that carved it out of the dry sandstone plains looks by comparison.

We had a lot of fun roaming around, taking interesting pictures and video footage (stay tuned for some actual moving pictures, once we get them edited together), and terrorizing the squirrels. Incidentally, the squirrels around the southern rim of the Grand Canyon are possibly the fattest, most spoiled rotten creatures that walk the face of God's own green earth. They have neither fear nor respect for anything. David was contemplating what would happen if you were to swat one of these squirrels off the rim of the canyon, but we were unable to ascertain the proper results. So, instead, we watched the crows antagonize the California Condors, and avoided the tourist hordes as much as possible.

While filming later in the afternoon, we met a small group of students from various parts of the world. For some reason, it didn't occur to us to actually film them (although it beats me why not -- we film just about everything else)

On the way up to the Canyon, some local Native Americans were having a great yard sale. In fact, as far as we can tell, they were selling the whole yard!

When we paid our $20 to get into the park, the helpful attendant gave us this receipt. We were particularly amused to note that it read "Server" and "Table" on the receipt (as circled at left).

Apparently, they use a point-of-sale system designed for a restaurant. Amusing that they couldn't even bother to get that changed.

Welcome to the Grand Canyon! We are standing on the southern rim of the canyon, facing more or less northeast, and the piece of the northern rim you can see at the left side of this picture is approximately 11 miles away.

Looks can be deceiving; Michael's guess was about three or four miles. The tiny grey-green ribbon down the left side of the picture is the Colorado River, on which the blame for the canyon itself rests squarely.

When we first arrived, it was difficult to tell how we could get good views of the canyon without being bumped and jostled by the hordes of tourists crowding the place. (Note that we, like everyone else, consider ourselves somehow different from tourists, even though we're doing the same basic thing).

It wasn't long before we realize that most of the other sightseers weren't willing to climb down rocks or get their hands dirty, and soon we were getting great views unmolested by Francophone domestic squabbles.

It's a long way down to get to the very bottom of this place. The sort of 45 degree slope you're seeing here is only a fraction of the way to the real bottom, which is much further down.

The canyon follows a sort of pattern. There's a steep, almost vertical drop, followed by an angled slope, and then the pattern repeats. Depending on where you are, this may happen three or four times before you get to the riverbed.

The canyon sits amid a region which is otherwise dry and barren. Plant life is much happier along the slopes where rainfall runoff has carved little channels leading down to the river, but sometimes even the best plans of trees and shrubs go awry, as this tree attests.

Click on this picture to get a closer view of the tree and its stony backdrop.

Here's David, giving a whole new meaning to the expression "living on the edge".

If you want, you can have a closer look at what David's sitting next to.

"I wonder," said David, "what it would happen if I were to just leap off of here."

"I'd have to inform your parents of your untimely demise," said Michael, "and they would be mightily displeased."

Recipe for Vertigo: Lean waaaaay out over the edge. Look down. Now, without stepping back, look up at the sky.

This picture was actually taken by letting the camera lean way out over the edge, rather than one of us, but it is still an awfully long way down.

In his usual fashion, Michael started going in unorthodox directions to get away from the places where the tourists were most thickly clustered.

Here, he enjoys a comfortable stone seat, looking out over the canyon. It beats me why David would want to take pictures of Michael, when there are so many more interesting views to be seen.

There was a small crevice in the rock, big enough to fit a person into, but without really good handholds to permit climbing down onto the shelf below. That doesn't usually stop us from trying, however.

"Blast it all. I think I dropped a contact."

(It is worth noting, at this juncture, that Michael does not wear contact lenses)

If you can't go under the rock, you might as well go over it.

The air is thick with crows and the occasional California Condor, swooping and gliding on thermals rising from the sun-baked stone below. It's hard to tell sometimes, whether they're being playful or aggressive.

From the rim, the lump if stone in the foreground is probably about a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the canyon.

There are lots of different kinds of stone here, and as you can see, they run in layers. The reddish sandstone is relatively soft, and erodes quickly; some of the other varieties are a bit more durable, and so take longer to fall apart.

These next four pictures don't really require much explanation, so we'll just let you look them over in peace.

David claims that I am wimping out by not writing my usual comments for these pictures. However, I figured I had better not strain your patience with my already minimal wit, when I don't have anything to add.

This rocky plinth was in danger of falling over when we arrived. Fortunately, Michael was there to save the day. Here you can see him holding up the rock formation, until the Park Service arrives to balance it again.

Although he does not want you to know it, Michael is actually an abject coward when it comes to heights. For this reason, he prefers to peer over the edge from a safe position. He finds this much preferable to leaning over the edge from a standing position.

This is the same rock face you'll see David standing on, two pictures below this one.

Scientists believe that this rock formation is actually the very top of an enormous, fossilized pre-Cambrian submarine, a bit the worse for the wear, but still identifiable. Unfortunately, the rest of the sub appears still to be buried in the surrounding rocks.

David stands atop a tall spire of smooth stone, which happened to be close enough that we could walk out onto it. It's a long way down from here (this is the same pillar you can see Michael lying face down upon, two pictures above).

It is the nature of a place like the grand canyon to make a person spend most of his time staring off into the distance at some natural marvel or other. Or maybe Michael is just being clueless again.

You decide.

Michael's mother always told him his face would get stuck like that, if he didn't stop.

Well, Mom, you were right.

The western regions of Arizona seem to be much less barren than the northeastern portion. The trees are more numerous, and larger, and the ground actually appears to be green, rather than the deep reddish brown of the Navajo lands we drove through only yesterday.

Here we are on I-40, driving west toward Kingman, AZ, where we are staying for the night.

Michael is being amused by something in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which we are currently in the process of listening to on cassette.

After a long day, we follow the sun, setting beautifully over a distant hill, toward a much-needed rest.

What happens when an electrical engineer and a computer scientist go on vacation together? Well, for one thing, the car fills up with geek gadgets.

Here, you can see the screen of Michael's PowerBook, where David is working on some footage we took outside of Moab, UT on Day 3. The small rectangle of greenish light is the GPS, which tells us how far it is to the next point along our intended route.

We've been doing a lot of travelling the past several days, so we decided we'd take a break from sightseeing to get in a little lightsaber practise.

This panorama was composed by the same basic means we used to get the Martian landscape and the field of Nebraska corn.