After somehow sleeping through a wind storm, Derm and Katie woke up with the birds and packed up camp to head to Grand Canyon! We thanked our neighbors for the delicious apple pie and for keeping our beers cold in their cooler, and we hit the road.
We took beautiful back roads 140 miles from Zion into Arizona, the Grand Canyon State! We decided to stop at a grocery store in town and buy $50 worth of breakfast, lunch and steak dinner to be better prepared campers for Grand Canyon.
On the road again, we passed many Native American jewelry and gift shops along the road, but pressed on for the “Bigger” Canyon. Our national parks pass finally paid itself off, as we decided to take the Southern Route (more scenic, but longer to get to) into the Canyon. We headed to Mather’s Campground, puzzled as to what time it was…
Arizona doesn’t participate in daylight savings, and they will simply follow the Pacific time zone… so we gained an hour! Katie remembered this odd occurrence when she was in Arizona 10 years ago with her sister– and they thought they missed the Bisbee, AZ Mining tour. Turned out they were an hour early!
After Dermot ‘worked it’ and got our camping site for free (since we missed our earlier reservation, two days ago) and headed to site 14 in the “Aspen” loop. We have become quite the professional camp setter-uppers, as we were done about 25 minutes later.
We both agreed on the South Kailib Trail, a 2-4 hour hike into the Canyon. This is the trail you could hike all the way to the bottom of the canyon. However, they DO NOT recommend doing the entire 6.3 miles in one day. So we did 3 miles to about 1,140 feet down into the Canyon.
It was definitely a different experience to hike DOWN first, but we really enjoyed the beautiful views, smells of mule dung and feeling like an ant in a humongous canyon.
We continued our hike down, as Katie’s ears popped, and we passed other ‘ripe’ smelling hikers speaking all types of languages. This was not a hike for the non-fit, and we could definitely smell the workout we would received on the hike back out.
We arrived to Cedar Ridge without a sweat and enjoyed the 360 degree views of the canyon. Even from 1,140 feet down, we still couldn’t see the Colorado River…. but we vowed that we would come back to do a rafting trip and see the canyon from the bottom.
We finished the hike in just under 2 hours …. just in time for the sunset. We caught the bus to Yaki Point, only about 250 feet higher then our previous spot, but we got a beautiful view of the setting AZ sun on the Canyons. We edited/deleted SEVERAL shots…and below are the winning ones!
After the sunset, we headed back to camp to enjoy our marinating steaks, baked beans and grilled corn, which all tasted delicious after our 2 hour hike. We played a few rounds of cards and fought off the bird-sized moths (Carla and Katie’s Mom would have freaked…) that thoroughly enjoyed our camping lantern.