The Grand Canyon

Well pardner, we began the day with a gunfight.

Yep, a real old-fashioned gunfight at the Grand Canyon Railway Corral. Before the train ride to the Grand Canyon, the company treats you to a show. Four cowboys, three horses, and a marshal shoot it out. It’s actually a fun show. The performers do cowboy schtick, snag victims…uh…volunteers from the audience and, when the marshal shows up, try to blame all their bad deeds on them. It was really funny.



Then we got on the train. It’s two and a half hours to the Grand Canyon, and it was fun. There was a continental breakfast, a singing Navajo musician who told jokes and sang some beautiful songs in four languages -- English, Navajo, German and French -- and a conductor who told jokes and offered all sorts of stories and trivia. There are, for example, telegraph poles running along the rails. But they’re short -- which made Barry so happy -- so that if there was a break in the line, it could be repaired by a cowboy standing on his horse.



The Grand Canyon itself is indescribable. You see pictures of it (and in fact, you’ll see our pictures), but they can’t begin to capture the scope of it. It’s…well, it’s big. When she first saw it, Lulu said simply, “This is incredible!” and that pretty much sums it up.



Among the first things we saw there was The Most Dangerous Animal in the Park: a rock squirrel. We were warned on the train: they’re cute, so lots of people feed them, but they can’t tell where the food ends and your fingers begin, so there are lots of squirrel bites. The clinic there treats at least eight bites a day. It’s illegal to feed them, but of course they have those big eyes…







The other thing they told us on the train was Rule Number 1: DON”T FALL IN THE CANYON!! This sounds pretty simple, so you wouldn’t think you’d need to be told that. But people can be incredibly stupid. We saw lots of people climbing out onto the very edges of rocks and cliffs -— with their kids! -- to get that perfect shot. Like it’s not still a mile deep if you’re standing two feet from the edge!

The two buildings you see are the world-famous El Tovar Hotel, a sublime example of Craftsman architecture. It opened in 1905 after two years of construction, and has hosted presidents, movie stars and other Really Important People who came to gawk at the Grand Canyon. This five-star facility has to be seen in person to be appreciated. The Indian-inspired structure you see is next door to the El Tovar; it's Hopi House, designed by some chick with four names and inspired by Hopi Indian desert structures. It, too, is an amazing building and was constructed in conjunction with the El Tovar. These two buildings are among the first things you see when you get off the train.




We took a bus tour of the South Rim while we were there, and the guide gave us tons of historical and scientific info about the Canyon. At one point, he showed us fish fossils in the rocks, left over from six million years ago, when the canyon was formed by ocean waves washing in and out. This fossil was at 7,000 feet, which means the ocean actually covered this entire area; the North Rim of the Canyon is 9,000 feet in altitude. Amazing!

We got back to the train, very tired. Besides the altitude, it’s just hard work being awed all day! We expected the train ride back to be boring, but it was even more fun than the ride up. A fiddler named Barry ("Don't call me Barely") got everyone moving, and then Evan, our conductor, passed around champagne, which livened the mood even more. And passengers began chatting and sharing more, too. Have you noticed how people are reluctant to talk to each other at the beginning of a trip? They’re worried about being stuck with a bore the whole time. But when the trip is almost over, they open up, because they know they won’t be stuck very long. Same thing on the train. Turns out the people across from us were two pairs of mothers and daughters on a month-long trip around the country to celebrate the two mothers’ 80th birthdays. What a cool group they were. And while we were talking to them, Ann mentioned she taught at Harbor College. A girl in the back of the car piped up to say she attends the Teacher Prep Academy at Harbor, and her father said he’d coached basketball there years before. Small world! Anyway, it was a party all the way home.

We got back tired but happy, ate dinner, and fell into bed. We have to leave here tomorrow, and we’ll be sorry to go — there’s so much more we didn’t see. It's reassuring we have another 40 years to see the place again, until Global Warming retakes the Grand Canyon.

Until next time…