Grand Canyon

Since Nate is on a 9-80 schedule here in ABQ, we were able to go to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon over a 3-day weekend. Nate had never been to the Grand Canyon at all, and I had never been to the South Rim, so we braved ourselves for the nearly 6 hour drive each way, and the trip was amazing and fun.




When we arrived on Friday afternoon, after a brief stop in Gallup, NM (home of some Route 66 stuff and Native American trading posts), we were excited to find that at the Grand Canyon, Canon was giving free photography classes and you even got to use their fancy cameras :-) Nate has been wanting to do a photography class like that for a long time, and getting to use their nice cameras was an added bonus. We signed up for an intermediate class and enjoyed learning new things. Supposedly we are going to get an email with a link to all the pictures we took, but it's been a week and we are still waiting. The views we saw during class and otherwise were stunning and varied.




Luckily, everything we did was dog-friendly enough that Snoopy got to tag along the whole time, and happily never ended up in the dreaded kennel. He was a little upset at the realities of the desert climate since he didn't have any grass to run around in. His highlight of the trip was when we found a large patch of grass in front of some of the hotels (a close second was when he was petted during the entire ranger program by a few boys who missed their dog). The main difficulty in the grass was keeping him away from all the elk droppings. Seems he's not the only four legged critter that likes the grass.

The South Rim has 12 miles of nice trails along the rim, plus other views that we drove to. I don't know how much we hiked, but we were on our feet nearly the whole weekend.




One of the major highlights of the Grand Canyon was seeing a Condor, twice! Condors are an endangered species with a 9 and a half foot wing span, and there are only 73 in the Arizona/Utah area. We felt incredibly lucky to see an endangered species twice. We saw one condor at rest early in the day with a huge number tagged to his wing, and we saw another in the afternoon flying in the air. Here is a picture of #23, both zoomed in and out, that we saw resting on a rock below us. We didn't catch the number of the one we saw later on flying.



We also went to an interesting ranger talk about condors, and the park ranger gave us a history of the Condor #23 that we saw. She said #23 was raised by a PUPPET(!) in the LA Zoo before being released and is now 16 years old. Condors mate for life, but unfortunately last year #23's mate and baby chick died of lead poisoning. Sadly the lead poisoning came from eating leftover guts of a deer that was killed with a lead bullet by hunters. Hunters have effectively killed many of the endangered condors in the area because of their lead bullets. The bullets break into many pieces upon penetration and when the hunters gut the deer (or elk), they take the parts of the animal they want, but leave the guts that they don't want to rot and for scavenger birds like condors to eat (and poison and kill them).




Besides the photography class and condor talk, we also went on a ranger-led geology talk, moonlight walk, and sunset talk. We were sad that we didn't get any great sunset pictures even though the view was spectacular. We happened to be at the Grand Canyon over a full moon and it was incredible to see how much light the moon gave off. You could actually see very well late at night.




As you can tell, it was a great weekend.