The Grand Canyon - South Rim

It will be impossible for me to convey in words or with photos the beauty and grandeur of the Grand Canyon. The views just take your breathe away, and this happens over and over again. We walked over 5 miles along mthe rim, and found that if we just moved a bit beyond the bus shuttle stop we were able to get away from the crowds, and what crowds there were. The last time I was here was in January and no one was here, not the case this time. So many buses, so many cars, so much lodging, you really have to work at it to get away from the crowds and we did. Plus the variety of languages that we heard. English was definitely the minority. It always amazes me how many people from away come to the USA to travel. Ken says that there are 4 million people a year who come to the Grand Canyon - amazing.








When we woke up yesterday it was very cold. We bundled up and headed for the shower facility in the car. I turned on the seat warmer - pure heaven. When we got to the shower facility there were 3 elk between us and the door, one was a very large and beautiful male with a full rack. Ken said to just walk on by it since he was interested in the green grass, but I waited for him to move over instead. That was the first of many sightings, the elk and mule deer were everywhere. We even had a condor fly right in front of our bus. They are the ugliest bird, our eagle is much better to look at.




On one of our walks we met a lovely older woman walking alone. We walked with her for a spell and she told us that she was from Tuscon and came back to the Canyon every year. She was a patron of the Canyon and every year artists come and paint for a week. The paintings are auctioned off and the money is used to support the Canyon. She had purchased more than one painting the night before. She also told us about the Trail of Time. We went there for our afternoon walk. It started at the present and had markers on the ground counting back 2 billion years, which is when the Grand Canyon began it's formation. Along the walk were samples of rocks dating to that point in time with a rock sample from the Canyon. The rocks were beautiful - granites, limestones, sandstones and rocks that we had never heard of. Two miles later we had covered 2 billion years in the story of the formation of the Canyon, and over our right shoulder the entire way was the view of the Canyon. A wonderful way to end our visit here.






I must add that we were quite take with all of the flowers that we saw - yellows, purples, reds, oranges and white. Of course I forgot to take a picture of them but they were beautiful!

I am late getting this update posted. We have already been toPhoenix and are moving on but I will update you on all of this soon.

Hope you are all well. Only 2 weeks left on this adventure. It is going by much too fast!

j/k
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