gorgeous gorge

Now that I’m finished and just wasting my time I can catch up with the stories I didn’t tell. I won’t cover everything but there is one issue that must not be left out – the Grand Canyon.

My dad visited me over here and besides checking out many of the restaurants in town we also took a longer trip to Tusayan, Arizona. This is a tiny village just south of the entrance to the Grand Canyon National Park that only exists to provide services to tourists.

Getting there takes a while. In fact, it’s a 10-hour drive (given no major jams on the way). Once you leave the Los Angeles metropolitan area on the Interstate 15 you cut across the mountains into the desert towards Barstow. We came across this freight train near the Cajun junction. These trains (we saw more during the trip) are extremely long and usually pulled by three or four locomotives. Once over the mountains the road turned into what people in Europe have in mind when they think about American highways: an endless boring road that makes drivers fall asleep and crash into trucks. But even there in the desert, you will find lots of small and medium size villages and towns, scattered across the landscape, along with which come the shopping malls that enrich the dull desert backdrop with a blast of colors. Capitalism 1 – desert 0. Hurray!

Same as Germans, Americans whine about the ever-rising gas prices. The cheapest we got on this trip was 3.55 Dollars. Per gallon. That’s 3.8 liters. I’d laugh if the problem of dwindling fossil resources and carbon dioxide emissions wasn’t so serious. Now it’s around 4.80 a gallon in the coastal urban regions of California, which is still ridiculously cheap. If people in Germany don’t consider to carpool (let alone switch to – heaven forbid – cycling) at 1.50 Euros per liter, it just has to get yet more expensive. Fuck you gas-guzzlers, that’s a solid nail in your Hummer’s coffin!

After hours and hours and hours of driving we eventually arrived. On the next day we headed towards the canyon and – Bam! – it is absolutely mind-blowing. You stand on top of the rim, gazing at billions of years of rock formation and millions of years of erosion. You take photos over photos but it’s plain impossible to capture. Here’s one of the best photos that I took but it gives you just a glance of the grace of this breathtaking landscape.

If I tell you that the gorge is an average 1 mile deep this sounds impressive but you probably still have a hard time imagining a vertical distance of that dimension. In this image you can see people walking on the crest. The following image provides a wider view. That’s not even the full height – it goes on. And on. You can’t even see the Colorado River at the bottom from this point.

We even took the liberty of a helicopter flight across the canyon. The view was fascinating but I was scared out of my mind in this light and unstable helicopter on such a windy day.

But there’s more than just the gorge to gaze at. Along the rim you can find some interesting rock formations, spooky tree carcasses and cuddly squirrels. Then there’s the Imax in Tusayan. Seriously, what’s the most famous gorge in the world without a killer theater?!

On the morning of the day we were planning to leave I opened the curtains of the hotel room and – Bam again! – stared at three inches of snow. Over night. This was reason enough to take a quick look at the canyon instead of leaving immediately. Since the climate inside the canyon is very different from the one on the plateau there was no snow inside. An interesting view.

The take-home message of this entry is: If you ever get the chance to see the Grand Canyon, take it. Whether you just walk on the rim or actually hike down and back doesn’t matter, but you have to see it.