Desert View
Our campground is an hour away from Grand Canyon National Park so it took a while for us to get over to the park. We parked at the visitor’s centre and went to walk along the South Rim Trail, which follows the edge of the Grand Canyon. I mean, I know you see pictures of it all the time, but in real life the Canyon is so huge it’s almost impossible to wrap your head around it. The thing is ten miles wide and one mile deep. It’s basically a different world. In the park, Kizmet was only allowed on the top of the Canyon, not down in it so we had to stay on the trail the whole time we were there. We walked for a while, from the visitor’s centre to the Yavapai Museum of Geology, which Isaac and Dad went in to learn about the rock formations in the Canyon. I was getting pretty
hungry by this point and so was everybody else, so we walked back to the truck to eat the lunch we had brought. After we ate, we drove over the Historic Grand Canyon Village to walk around. It wasn’t exactly a large village, but there we a couple of hotels right on the edge of the Grand Canyon. We also went in to the Kolb brothers studio. The Kold brothers had lived and worked there, selling photographs of the Canyon to tourists, through most of the 1900s. After
the shop, we went to check out the Bright Angel Lodge, built int he early 20th century and designed by Mary Colter, who was a surprisingly well-renowned architect for that day and age. In the lodge, there was a hotel about the history of tourism in the area. The Harvey Girls were talked about a lot. They were the waitresses hired by Fred Harvey who became so popular, a movie about them, starring Judy Garland, was made in 1946. By the time we finished looking around the lodge, there were some rather intimidating storm clouds rolling in and we decided to do some scenic
driving. The drive was around twenty miles long. We drove to the very end of the trail and then turned around to stop at the viewpoints along the way back. The first stop was at some more Pueblo ruins which were a little off the canyon, which was suspected to be the home of about thirty people. The second stop and our first viewpoint was called Desert View, which had a massive stone tower also designed by Mary Colter and built with rocks collected from the Canyon so that it looked like it was part of the landscape. The inside decoration was all influenced by the Natives of the area. Colter was famous for using the land
where she built as inspirations for her buildings, which was a unique idea and very different from what most other architects of the age were doing. We took some pictures of the canyon. There were a few more viewpoints after that. One of them was looking over the site of a 1956 airplane crash, where two planes from different airlines collided in mid-air, killing all the passengers. There were some pictures of debris from the crash beside a memorial plaque, but you couldn’t see the site from our height. One we finished with the drive, we headed back to the trailer for dinner and movie before turning in for the night. Peace out m8s.