West Wishes 3: The Grand Canyon

(Preparatory fact: If you’re tired enough, you’ll sleep anywhere.)

We have done a lot of early-leaving on this trip. We left early to catch the plan. We left earlier to start our drive out to Flagstaff. We left almost as early to get to the Grand Canyon and we left absurdly early to get to Bryce. Then, when we were going back, we left the earliest. Most of the leavings we did happened when the sun couldn’t even be bothered to accompany us. It had to catch us on the way. 

Driving through the California mountains and the Arizona desert at dawn and through the morning had a loveliness I didn’t expect. We saw the land change as the sky changed, watched the vegetation disperse and shrink as we got closer to the sunbaked lands. I’d talk about the desert, but I finished Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and the desert she sees is lovelier than the one you would hear through my description. One of my favorite quotes from the novel: 

“Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.” 

We did lunch in Phoenix, which was much more tenable to me than I expected. That whole “it’s a dry heat” thing? Exceedingly accurate. We ate at a great place for lunch, we went to the Heard Museum, and we went to the Musical Instrument Museum, which you gotta try, seriously. And then we drove on through Arizona, past cacti and hills that were probably mountains all the way up to Sedona, where we stopped by a bookstore as it was closing, got advice and postcards, and found our way to getting these lovely pictures.

Because who doesn't love a good javelina?

Eventually, we got up to Flagstaff and hit up a hotel and a sandwich shop. It was one of those days that feels like it must have been several smashed together into one. Space and time are relative and all of that, but the brain has a way of conflating the two, so that events that occurred hundreds of miles away must also have been separated from you by more than a few hours. The stay in Flagstaff was a wonderful reset button for my mental trip odometer. 

We hit the Grand Canyon on Saturday morning  and drove past most of the overlooks in order to get a campground. We got a spot, pitched our tent, and went back to the Watchtower near the east entrance of the park. There were, of course, people everywhere, from teenagers to families to old people traveling in groups, all of them taking pictures and staring and laughing and jumping and walking. We went up in the tower and looked out and took in our first real glimpse of the canyon as opposed to the over-the-shoulder glimpse I got while driving in, which by itself blew me away. 

Inside the Watchtower was also exciting

From there we hit each viewpoint and I let Joy get a lifetime of pictures, which I will put here whenever Joy uploads them to facebook and lets me steal some of them.  We did the blue dress picture at Navajo point and bought a necklace there as well, which I proceeded to wear for days on end for fear of losing it. We did a picnic lunch and got spooked by the thunder and went back to check on our tent, which didn’t have the rain cover on it yet. Then we napped in the wonderfully dry and warm tent and went back for more pictures and fun. 

Nature: Absurdly Beautiful

And then it rained.

And then it rained some more.

In fact, it didn’t stop raining until about midnight. I know because I was awake. Southern California shared the first rain it had in months with the Grand Canyon which would have been fine if our tent had been as waterproof as we had hoped. We came back to a puddle, which we thought we dried with a aplomb, and drank a bottle of wine and ate snacks, huddled around a propane lantern. Then, when the puddles made it clear that this was their tent and not ours, we retreated to the car, whose back seat was still covered with supplies and gear, and made ourselves as comfortable as possible in the front two seats. I turned the car on for about ten minutes every hour or so, whenever the shivering became untenable. During one of these sleep interruptions, I noticed the rain had stopped. During another, I saw a break in the clouds and stars.

Then, the next morning, when the rain had cleared out, we packed up all of our soaking belongings and wrung out of the soaking tent and went back to the watchtower for one more look at the canyon. I don't know if you've ever been able to look at the Grand Canyon in the morning, when no one else is around and lingering rainclouds hide and reveal the landscape as shift on the breeze, but I have, and I can tell you, it's worth it. 

Click on it. You won't be disappointed.

So, so worth it.