Grand Canyon Teil 1

Sunday, October 15, 2023, day 15

Today begins our 3rd week in the USA.

We had a freezing cold night, while it's 25-30° during the day, it's only between five and 9° here at night. It's because here in Arizona we are at over 2000 m altitude. The Grand Canyon south rim is also at 2000 m, while the north rim is at 2300 m.

Here we are on a huge plateau, with a panoramic view of 30-40 km as far as the eye can see. All prairie landscape, desert with isolated bushes, not populated.

The sun rises shortly after 6:00 a.m. and is already radiating a pleasant warmth by 8:00 a.m. That helped us a lot today. We first took a hot shower and then drove off to the Grand Canyon, about an hour's drive from Williams. During the entire journey you have no idea that the Grand Canyon could be back there, even in the parking lot where we parked our motorhome, and not at the visitor center, you can sense it is the Grand Canyon. Only when you walk to the edge and look steeply downhill do you see the Grand Canyon. It's like a huge crack in the landscape, a long hole that you only see when you stand in front of it. The Grand Canyon is 450 km long, between 6 km and 30 km wide and up to 1800 m deep. We decided to go on a hike and hiked a total of 9km along the south rim of the Grand Canyon with spectacular views. The photos only give an idea of what these rock formations are all about. The mountains were formed over 2000 million years (and that's only about 2/5 of the Earth's age) in several layers, including shallow lake water, swamps, dunes, lakes, and you can see it on the fault line. A geological masterpiece spanning an incredible number of millions of years.

After our hike we went back to Williams for another night as we want to go to the Grand Canyon again tomorrow.