Williams

Travel Day - Las Vegas, NV

On Saturday I made the 160 mile, three hour drive to Las Vegas, Nevada for the night. The campground wasn’t the nicest and didn’t seem to be in a great part of town, but the site was level enough that I didn’t have to unhook the trailer, and it was less than a 20 minute Uber to the strip, so it was adequate for the night: I met my friend Bridgette at Beer Park in front of the Paris hotel to watch the UK football game. The weather had cooled off a lot so we were able to comfortably sit outside, which was a nice change. It was great to see her and nice to have another UK fan to watch the game with!

After the game I went across the street and watched the Bellagio fountains run a few times, and then headed back to my trailer. By far the earliest I’ve ever been to bed in Vegas, but I still think it was the right thing to do since I had to do more driving the next morning.

Travel Day - Williams, AZ

The next day I continued another 160 miles over about 2.5 hours on to Williams, Arizona to another nice but cramped RV park: The main reason for me to come here was to see the Grand Canyon, so I was a little disappointed the closest place I could get reservations was still about an hour south of the South Rim, but it ended up working well because I could see more stuff in the area.

Grand Canyon South Rim

On Monday I drove up to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon without much of a plan, so once I got there I started walking the rim trail. Fortunately it was relatively flat and the views were amazing, so I ended up doing the whole 14 mile trail. This is another park where personal vehicles aren’t allowed on most of the scenic drive, so they have buses that can take you between the scenic points, but I found the best and most quiet views were in-between the stops, so it definitely made the walk worth it. There are probably a million better pictures out there of the Grand Canyon, but here are a couple that I took:

The last couple miles I did right as afternoon thunderstorms were rolling in, and there was a brief period with rain coming down in the canyon but not along the rim:

Flagstaff Area Monuments

Tuesday I did little other than grocery shopping, laundry, and resting the blister on my foot. I started Wednesday morning by driving to Winslow, Arizona, where I was standing on the corner: I then had an excellent breakfast down the street at the Flatbed Ford Cafe.

From there I made my way back to the Flagstaff area and headed to the Walnut Canyon National Monument. It was not only a really pretty canyon with lots of greenery compared to the other canyons I’d been visiting: but it was also home to the Hopi people where they had built their homes in to the sides of the canyon and you got to walk around to see some of them: It was cool to walk down in to the canyon but it was 736 steps to do the trail!

It didn’t take long to do both trails and see everything Walnut Canyon had to offer, so then I headed to Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. This park had recently been hit by a wildfire and was only just starting to begin reopening, so there wasn’t much to do here since even the Visitor Center was still closed. There was a very short trail with some info about the landscape and you could see the volcano from a distance though:

I then headed over to the Wupatki National Monument, which was really close by, they share an entrance and scenic drive. Wupatki is another Hopi community, but this one is the remains of a pueblo structure: One thing this monument did that I really liked was they gave out laminated “trail guides” that had all the info that many other national parks put on signs. I found this better because the signs that are outside all the time are often faded by the sun, and they are also often blocked because people feel the need to stand directly in front of them instead of off to one side or a few feet back to allow others to read at the same time.

Grand Canyon North Rim

On Thursday I decided I wanted to check out the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I’m not really sure why, but I figured this would be the trip to do it because it is not very convenient to get to, so not sure when I would ever get back to that side. Well after making the 4+ hour drive to get there, I can report it probably wasn’t worth the drive over just going to the South Rim from Williams. I guess I had hoped that there would be significantly less people there, which I guess there was, but there is also significantly less infrastructure to handle the people that were there. After spending less than two hours checking out some of the trails and viewpoints, I decided to make the long drive back:

Grand Canyon Bright Angel Trail

I didn’t do much on Friday, other than write most of this blog post and a little reading. Saturday morning I went back to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and did part of the Bright Angel trail, which is one of the main trails that people use to get down into the canyon. I went down to the first stop along the way, “only” 1.5 miles down the trail, but it was over 1200 feet of elevation down. There were water pipeline issues, so the first two stops on the trail did not have water, so I wasn’t comfortable going to the next stop with the amount of water I was carrying. It was cool to see the canyon from a slightly different perspective: It’s really amazing to look back up at the rim to see how far down I had gone: