Today was a day most people had been really looking forward
to – arriving at the Grand Canyon NP. We had about 140 miles to cover before we
got there though and there was a slight tweak to the itinerary to attend to
before we departed.
We all had to be up rather a lot earlier than we would have
meant to be normally due to most of the group wanting to go on a tour of Slot
Canyon and check out the sandstone rocks there. We dropped them off and the
remainder of us (Us and Stefano) along with Damian went off to do the group’s
shopping! We parked back at the place until the others returned from their
trip, witnessing a Japanese tourist managing to mount his hire car on top of a
huge kerb as we waited.
The last stop before the canyon itself was at the sign for
the entrance to the Grand Canyon NP where we all had another group photo.
On this journey we were all given paper bags and black marker
pens and we told to draw the person who we were sharing a tent with’s face onto
the bag. We all took great pleasure in this and pretty soon we all had our
“likenesses” on paper bags courtesy of each other.
Eventually Damian asked us all to don the paper bags with
our faces on which we were not to remove until he told us so! We pulled up into
a car park and then all jumbled out of the van. There was a lot of giggling and
chattering from people around us as they all clearly were baffled about what
was occurring. Damian then led us, in a line where we all placed our hands on
the person in front’s shoulders until a certain point. He then led us one by
one down a slight slope and positioned us side by side. We were clearly the
centre of attention as the murmurings had audibly increased somewhat and all
the noise seemed to be coming from in front of us. Damian then gave us a
countdown…
…3…2…1…GO and we all removed our bags to be confronted with,
not only the pretty awesome first views of the Canyon, but a crowd of snap
happy Korean tourists all laughing and taking pictures of this group of 7,
shocked travellers! The view was amazing and the paper bag method was a fun way
for us to experience our first views of the Grand Canyon. We spent about 15
minutes here taking photos and trying to comprehend that this was just a tiny
portion of the 277 miles stretch of canyon that averages a width of about 10
miles across!
After this we all set up camp and then had to whizz off to
make our next stop. After stopping briefly to drop off Stefano (who would walk
along some of the rim of the canyon) we continued to the nearby airport where
we all checked in for our 50 minute helicopter flight. This flight took us over
a large portion of the canyon and was a remarkable way to see the vastness of
this wonder. There are lots of restrictions for aircraft in this NP and so we
could not go below a certain altitude in the canyon but there were still a
couple of time where the helicopter rushed above the tree-tops before dropping
off the cliff edge to let us behold incredibly dramatic views over the huge,
and difficult to comprehend depths of this colossal place. There was a point
where we were told the height of some cliff was 3 times the height of the
Empire State Building but this was so hard to fathom as you couldn’t really get
a size of scale in this goliath. The ride was over too soon but everyone was
more than happy with the flight.
We picked Stefano up and went back to camp for the night.
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