Grand Canyon

26/03/12-27/03/12

Having only spent the night in Vegas we were once again on the move eastwards towards Arizona. As we were approaching the border just a short distance from Vegas our first stop off for the day was at the mighty Hoover Dam. Built to provide water for the west coast the dam is right on the border, on one side lays Nevada on the other Arizona. Parking up we first got a view of the dam from the bridge built so traffic can bypass going over it. Looking down on it only gives you a small sense of the scale of the construction; it is only when you actually walk across the top of the dam that you fully appreciate how much water it contains in Lake Mead stretching through the canyon behind it. Without the dam settlement in states such as California would have been impossible without the vital water supply it provides, a true wonder of engineering in the modern world. Crossing the bridge we found ourselves in our second new state in two days – Arizona. Our destination was to be the Grand Canyon National Park, to get there we would only have to make two left hand turns in total over a course of 250 miles. Arizona is a vast state but practically empty and you really get a sense of this emptiness when travelling along the straight desert roads. Mile after mile the landscape around you stays the same, mountain ranges seem follow you, the road just keeps dragging you along. To break up the long drive we stopped off at the town of Kingman to have lunch. There we discovered part of the longest surviving stretch of the historic Route 66 road left in the States. Over 100 miles of the original road still exists in Arizona, the modern Interstate that lead to the downfall of the route practically follows the same route today. Moving on we eventually got to our overnight accommodation just outside of the national park, tomorrow it was the turn of nature to cause us wonder.

Having done the major part of the driving yesterday we only had 9 miles to cover to get to the Grand Canyon National Park. After paying the entrance fee and finding a place to park we watched the brief introductory film at the visitor centre, it was one of those typical patriotic American films you expect and as I predicted a hearty round of applause erupted at the end. With a view in our head of what to expect we followed the path to get our first actual view of the Grand Canyon and upon arriving at the edge a sense of speechlessness overcame all of us. The statistics themselves make for impressive reading, the canyon is a mile deep and at its widest it is 10 miles across from one side to the other. When you see this with your own eyes the numbers go out of the window, the scale and size is just too much of your brain to register properly. It’s huge and unless you see it with your own eyes you cannot remotely know what it’s like to be witness to this natural vastness, and to think it has all been created by the process of erosion. The thing that most surprised me was how quiet it was, I thought we would be continually hearing the wind roaring through but there was nothing, it was like being near a vast vacuum – the canyon just consumed noise. We drove along and stop off at several viewpoints but the canyon’s effect was just the same, a true wonder of the natural world and a sight that cannot be matched elsewhere on this planet. Eventually we made our way back to the strip of Vegas following the same route we had taken the day before, I hoped we would arrive in time to see the strip lit up but the sun just held out long enough to deny me this wish.