October 2018.
The following takes place entirely on travel day 11 in the American Southwest. The previous day was a long one on the road: from Flagstaff, we drove north on US-89 and US-89A next to Echo Cliffs and Vermilion Cliffs, and ending up at North Rim for our first-ever visit to the Grand Canyon.
After overnighting at Cliff Dwellers Lodge, a new day began with a stop at the Rock Houses nearby, then retracing the previous day’s drive back to Cameron, before turning west to spend the rest of the day at the Desert View section of the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. That began our first-time visit to the South Rim which we visited over a period of two days.
Total distance from Cliff Dwellers to Flagstaff (via South Rim): 217 mi (349 km).
Above/featured: West-northwest from Mohave Point – 15 October 2018.
The Grand Canyon National Park has very different timescales: over 100 years of human inscription as a national park, but almost 2 billion years of geologic history.
European colonizers and settlers recognized protection was required for the big dramatic landscape. On 26 February 1919, U.S. Congress passed legislation “An Act to Establish the Grand Canyon National Park in the State of Arizona” which was signed by President Woodrow Wilson. With its official designation, the country’s 15th National Park encompasses over 1-million acres (almost 405-thousand hectares) in surface area and several thousand years of history of human habitation by indigenous peoples, including the Havasupai, Hualapai, Hopi, Navajo, Paiute, and the Zuni, who consider the Grand Canyon as their ancestral birthplace. UNESCO inscribed the Grand Canyon National Park as World Heritage Site in 1979.
The park also includes over a billion years of geologic history. By geologic standards, the Grand Canyon itself is relatively “young” with the Colorado River carving into the rock about 5 to 6 million years ago. However, the Vishnu basement rock in the Grand Canyon is over 1.7 billion years old, even though that age is only 38 percent as old as the Earth’s oldest rocks at 4.5 billion years.
Over three days in October 2018, we explored parts inside Grand Canyon National Park. After our drive from Flagstaff to Vermilion Cliffs, we pushed forward to the North Rim and the winding scenic drive through the Kaibab National Forest took us to Point Imperial and Cape Royal in time for the day’s final illumination.
With a night spent at the beautifully serene Cliff Dwellers Lodge, we retraced our drive back to Cameron, then heading west to Desert View to the eastern section of the South Rim. After establishing our new ‘base’ in Flagstaff, we drove the following day to the main entrance of the Grand Canyon National Park (via Valle and Tusayan), and we spent the day in the western and central sections of the South Rim. The 1126 km (700 mi) we covered over the three days made up 22 percent of the entire 5049 km (3138 mi) driving distance accumulated in New Mexico and Arizona.
Since 1995, I’ve been fortunate to experience significant travel: first as green graduate student on my first (of many) trips to Chile; followed by the opportunity to live and work in 3 countries on 3 continents inside a span of 10 years. I didn’t give much thought about their relative importance at the time, but I’m lucky to have visited a number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS).
Fotoeins Fotografie 