The Pitts Stop

Arizona – Grand Canyon

April 17:  Flagstaff, AZ to Grand Canyon, AZ

This morning we drove up to the Grand Canyon, arriving shortly after noon to find that the entire Grand Canyon Park was without electrical power.  We took the bus shuttle over to the El Tovar Hotel to make dinner reservations for the next night.  The poor staff were struggling with all the folks calling to find out if they would be serving dinner that night.  They vowed to serve everyone that had reservations in the order they had been made starting two hours after the power returned.  Interesting – that could have meant folks would be dining after midnight!  Luckily, the power returned mid-afternoon. 

  After making our dinner reservations, we took another shuttle out to the west rim of the canyon and walked about two miles along the rim.  Jack is uncomfortable with any trail that gets too close to the edge – vertigo.  The canyon is so large that it is really difficult to grasp its enormity.  It feels more like you’re looking at a picture postcard.  The increasing haziness of pollution reinforces the feeling that what we’re looking at isn’t real. 

For dinner, we made a pork loin on the grill.  We were hungry and didn’t want to wait for the whole thing to cook, so I cut off a few pieces and grilled them.  While eating our dinner, we left the remainder of the pork loin on the grill to continue cooking.  A short while later, the pork loin was gone – one of the large aggressive ravens had simply taken it right off the grill.

April 18: Grand Canyon, AZ

Today is cool and very windy.  We went up to the rim and starting hiking down Bright Angel Trail, but the trail was too narrow with steep drop-offs for Jack’s vertigo.  Headed back to the RV for lunch and decided to drive over to Tusayan to see the Imax film on the Grand Canyon and the Lewis and Clark expedition.  The film was excellent – incredible photography, of course, and included the history of the people who inhabited the area and the explorers. Afterwards, we drove 25 miles out to the east end of the canyon to the Desert View area.  We made numerous stops at the various viewpoints and took lots of photos with good late-afternoon sun that gives the canyon more depth because of the shadows.  We stopped back at the El Tovar for a drink on the patio to watch the sunset.  It was getting very cold and the gusty winds made it feel even colder.  The sunset was blocked by a large cliff, so we froze for nothing.  No TV in Grand Canyon, so we played Yahtzee and went to bed early.

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