Day 4: April 11, 2000
North Fork of Grand Canyon

Colorado River from Navajo Bridge

Today was Grand Canyon day. We drove the 125-ish miles from Page, AZ to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The road took us along a long high butte for about 25 miles, then we curved our way down it into a huge valley that crossed the Colorado River at Navajo bridge. They had recently made a new wider bridge to handle the heavy trucks (in 1995), but they kept the previous one and you could walk across it. On the way there, we just drove over it, but we stopped to walk across on the way back. After a while, we left the dry valley with yellow buttes and ended up in an evergreen forest, which lasted about 50 miles. Most of the way, we listened to the Harry Potter tapes, figuring/hoping we'd be getting the new ones later that day so it was okay if we finished.

Rock formation near Navajo Bridge

When we arrived at the Grand Canyon, there was an overlook of one of the arms coming from the canyon, which looked like a regular, albeit large, canyon. Walendo looked at it and said it was nice, but wasn't all that impressed. A sign said to see the Grand Canyon, walk 100 yards to the right, which seemed kind of unlikely. We walked down and lo and behold, there was the real Grand Canyon, with its 11-mile crevice with layers upon layers of canyons. I walked out onto an outcropping and saw a little chipmunk sitting out at the very tip of the neighboring outcropping, looking out at the view. We walked along a paved path with Libby on her leash, going out to the tip of the ridge by the lodge. "Big" was the operative word. We sat out on the rocks at the end and soaked in the bigness. There were other people there pointing out the trails that had been carved into the canyon. Someday I'd like to hike down into the Grand Canyon.

Ellen & Libby at Grand Canyon

Neither of us took pictures. I felt like so many shots have been taken of the Grand Canyon that it's hard to do anything interesting with it. Plus it's a tough thing to capture on film. It's so big and vast with so many layers, but there's no one thing to capture your eye. It's very hard to capture on film the feeling of bigness and layers of depth, especially if you're restricted in where you can set up. I think it would take being inside the canyon somehow. Also, it was mid-day so there was a lot of glare looking out across the canyon, so just taking a panorama wouldn't come out well. (When I looked at some pictures of it later, I noticed that a lot of them have the problem of glare.)

After we'd had our fill, we walked back and went to the lodge, which turned out to be closed for the season until May 15. The place was quiet but fairly busy with tourists. It's surprising that they wait so long to open the season. Everything was closed, including even the bathrooms, so we had to go in the porta-potty, ugh. We went back to the first overlook and had a bit of lunch. It was kind of chilly and both of us were pretty sleepy, so we decided not to talk a little hike. There was a 1.5 mile trail to some campsites, but it didn't seem worth it. I had forgotten that there was another smaller road that took you to another overlook, so we just headed back. We listened to Harry Potter again on the way back. I was so sleepy that I listened with my eyes closed and let the story fill my dreams. At one point on the way back, we got stuck behind a wide truck that was painting yellow lines in the middle of the road and the white line on the right at the same time, kind of a neat machine. You couldn't pass because the paint was wet and it wouldn't be good to drive over it. Finally, it stopped painting and moved to the side, so we passed. Later we saw that we had yellow paint in the furrows of the tire and in the wheel well. (They still haven't come out of the wheel well.) When we came to the bridge, we stopped this time and walked across it and took some pictures. Then we headed back to the hotel. We checked to see if the Harry Potter tapes had arrived, but the woman said that FedEx usually didn't come till 4 or 5 and it was only around 3.

Striated rocks near Page, AZ

We wanted to go on the Glen Canyon Dam tour, so we dropped Libby off at the hotel and went to the Dam. As we walked in at 3:30, there was a tour joining and since it was free, we just joined it as the group was circled around the large-scale topo map of the area and the guide was explaining about the Dam. We learned that Page was established as part of building the dam. Apparently, this was the most desolate part of the country, so even though they filled hundreds of acres with water, they didn't have to displace many people. Once the dam was built, it took 17 years to fill the lake, and it now has 2000 miles of coastline. They said that even though it gets popular with boaters during the summer, you can still find inlets that no one been to in thousands of years. Once we started to head to the elevators, we found out we needed to have tickets, and they were sold out. And it was the last tour of the day, sigh. So much for that. We looked at some of the displays in the entrance area and watched some of the videos, one of which showed the dam being built. I think they used 6,000 gazillion gallons of concrete or thereabouts.

Lion profile in rock

There was one memorable shot of a man standing by a gigantic pipe that was bigger than he was with water shooting out of it horizontally. This was one of four pipes through which they release water when they want to lower the level of the lake. Water's pretty powerful stuff (as we'd noted on our adventure yesterday). After getting our fill, we went back to the hotel and took naps, which we sorely needed. At around 6:30 when the light was right, we drove down looking for a good spot to take pictures of swirly rocks. We drove on a dirt road and in a few hundred yards came to a fabulous hill of tons of orange and red swirly rocks with a deep blue sky. The lighting was perfect, so we had a ball running around on the rocks taking pictures. Lets hope a few of them came out well.

Closeup of striated rock

When the sun went behind the hill, we finished up and went back to the hotel. Since it was now after 7, we checked if the package of Harry Potter tapes had arrived, but alas, it hadn't. We were both very disappointed, though I wasn't all that surprised. Meanwhile, a huge bus of tourists had arrived and was taking up half the parking lot of the hotel. We decided to have a casual dinner, so I got a chicken fajita pita at Jack in the Box and Walendo got some crappy Chinese at a local place. While we were waiting for Walendo's food, I ran into the local grocery store to see if they'd have the tapes, realizing it was a million to one, and the odds were right: no tapes.

More striated rock

We went back to the hotel to eat dinner. Libby had helped herself to dinner in the form of 6 dog biscuits that were in a plastic bag, the bad girl. We logged on to see if George had forwarded the Amazon order but he hadn't, so we called him and he found out that the order was "shipping soon." Dammit, two days later for an overnight shipment and it's "shipping soon." He emailed them and told them we'd be moving on and the order would be rejected, and they should credit our credit card. Sigh. After that, we looked at the maps and tried to figure out where to go the next day. We had been thinking of driving along scenic roads up to Escalante, where we could drive down Hole in the Rock Road, a dirt road through Grand Staircase that went all the way to Lake Powell.

More striated rock closeup

It was a lot of driving, though, so we weren't sure if it would be worth it. Eventually, we decided to take the dirt road through the middle of Grand Staircase, called Smokey Mountain Road, which had a smaller road that cut across to Hole in the Rock (see map). We had seen a site on the Web that showed photos of the scenery in the three regions of the Grand Staircase and the road through the middle section looked the least interesting, but we decided to go for it anyway. We probably wouldn't make it all the way to Lake Powell, but this way we'd get to go on some of the off-road areas and spend one day instead of two.

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