Today is my last day of freedom... however it has been an amazing week off, so I suppose I shouldn't complain... time off does really make it hard to go back... but I know that I will also enjoy it once I get past tomorrow morning.
We left early Saturday morning last week for an 11 hour drive to Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona (a new state to add to my list of ones I've been to!). When we booked our campsite several months ago, we looked at the average weather for early April and it was said highs in the mid 60s and lows in the mid 30s. However, they of course had unseasonably cold weather while we were there. Definitely the coldest camping I've ever done! We had highs in the mid 40s to mid 50s, and lows in the 20s, and even 18 one night! The day times really weren't too bad because we were walking or hiking and moving around, and it was sunny most of the time. One day had 20 mph winds, 50 mph gusts, and snow/hail/sleet in the evening though.... that was my least favorite by far. The nights wouldn't have been too bad either, but you couldn't collect firewood, and we didn't have any to bring, so we had to buy it and those bundles are not cheap to have a big fire every night (not to mention little fires for cooking too). We ended up going to the evening ranger programs a few nights to stay warm... they were actually very interesting though :).
Now that we've covered how cold it was, onto the fun! Matt and I really do both enjoy camping, and we got a new tent with a lot more space, which made camping even better. Sunday was our first real day there, and we decided it was Easter, so we oughta take it a little easy. We walked along the rim, took the shuttle buses to the view points, took lots of pictures, and got all the touristy stuff out of the way. This was the first time I'd been to the Grand Canyon and it was absolutely breath taking! You really can't describe it well enough. Even when you're there, your eyes can hardly adjust, they just can't quite soak in the depth and distance all over the place. Let's put it this way, we saw a California Condor, which is this huge bird with like an 8 foot wingspan, but we didn't even know it until later because it looked like the size of a raven to us, our eyes couldn't interpret how far away it was.
Each of the next 3 days we did a day hike down into the canyon, each hike was about 1.5 miles in with 1,000 ft elevation change, so 3 miles round trip. I am sure you can imagine that any hike below the rim is 99% down hill, and then 99% uphill... complete with A LOT of steps! It is definitely very different hiking down, and then having to hike back up. It is very hard to judge your energy and know when you need to turn around because the hardest part is yet to come. I think I still prefer mountain hiking where the reverse it true! All the trails are mostly right along a cliff, and two of the trails had a bit of ice and snow on them yet, so you had to go pretty slow at times. And one of the trails was super windy... not exactly the most ideal when you feel like you're going to get blown off the edge! We hiked the Bright Angel trail, which is the most popular (and blocked the intense wind!), the South Kaibab trail, which was the super windy one (good thing we didn't do that one on the 50 mph wind day!), and the Hermit trail, which was very rocky and didn't have as good of views, but hardly had any people.
You could definitely tell it was spring break week! Sunday on the rim was packed, the 2 more popular trails were pretty busy (even on the super windy day when not as many people were out), there were lines for all of the shuttle bus stops, the hotels were packed, and even the campground was pretty full, despite the wintery weather.
We made a few goals while we were there. We want to return next year, or in the next couple of years, to backpack all the way down to the bottom of the canyon (8-9 miles with 6,000 ft elevation change) and camp, then hike back up the next day. Even though it was cold, spring break it the best time to go there because it's way less busy than the summer, and much cooler... the bottom of the canyon temps are only at around 80 (65-70 when we were there, however) in April, as opposed to 130 in July! And we made a goal that we want to visit every single National Park in our lifetimes... there are only like 55, and we've already been to at least half a dozen... we'll see how this goes!
Here are the pics on facebook.
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2 comments:
only 55? Are you sure? that's totally do-able.
Yes, Kate, 55 was very doable, especially since we were hiking... but that was the very warmest, and when the wind wasn't blowing. It was 40s and 30s and windy by dinnertime once we were not moving around anymore and at our campsite though :-P
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