Grand Canyon

On Saturday, October 27^th, we had breakfast at Chompie’s Deli, a transplanted New York delicatessen-restaurant.  I would be willing to bet that no New York deli has bottles of Tabasco red, Tabasco green and Cholula hot sauce at the tables.  Unfortunately, there was no WiFi there, but we enjoyed our omelets. 

Then we headed north.  We left around 12:30 and drove up I-17, through spectacular desert landscapes, to where it ends, at Flagstaff, arriving around 2:30.  Arizona is a land of pastels: oranges, beiges, yellows, pinks, speckled with green, under a bright blue sky.  Northern New Mexico, on the other hand, struck me as a land of deep browns and greens, while the desert around Las Vegas is a dirty gray. 

In Flagstaff, we found a recommendation, in Lonely Planet’s Southwest United States guide, for a café called La Bellavia.  Lonely Planet continued its perfect batting average as far as restaurants are concerned.  There we had some very good hamburgers. 

We had been climbing all day: Phoenix is at 1200 feet (around 360 meters), while Flagstaff is at 6900 feet (around 2070 meters).  There are three routes from Flagstaff to Grand Canyon Village.  We have never taken the western route, via I-40 due west to Williams, then due north on Arizona 64 to Valle, where the central route (U.S. 180) joins it for the last 28 miles to the Canyon.  If the scenery along the rest of the route is like the joint part, it is a flat, relatively uninteresting plain, dotted with juniper, piñon pine and sagebrush.  The South Rim of the Grand Canyon is, after all, only 100 feet (30 meters) higher than Flagstaff.

The eastern route is the longest and maybe the most scenic.  It passes north through the Painted Desert, on the Navajo Indian reservation, to Cameron, then turns west, along the canyon of the Little Colorado, where there is a tribal park, with an overlook of that canyon and stalls where you can buy Indian crafts.  A park ranger, describing this route to us, said that it illustrates the sort of land that we left the Navajo with: pretty, but not useful for much of anything.  You enter the National Park by the eastern entrance, at Desert View, where there is a tall watchtower designed by the famous Mary Jane Colter, who, as architect for the Santa Fe Railway and park concessionaire the Fred Harvey Company, built most of the park’s more interesting buildings in the 1920s and 1930s.  She is largely responsible for creating the “southwestern” look, based on Native American designs.  After driving along the South Rim for 25 miles, stopping, of course, at all the various overlooks (Grandview Point, Yaki Point, Mather Point, Yavapai Point), you arrive at Grand Canyon Village.  In April 2005, with Mary Joy’s parents, we took this route in the opposite direction, for our return to Phoenix.

But the route that we now take is the one we took going up in 2005, the central one, on U.S. 180, through the volcanic San Francisco Mountains northwest from Flagstaff.  While, as I’ve said, the South Rim of the Grand Canyon is only 100 feet higher than Flagstaff, this very scenic road goes up from 6900 feet to 8046 feet (around 2415 meters), before dropping back down to 7000.  It starts at the foot of Humphreys Peak, the tallest of the San Franciscos, at over 12,000 feet (around 3600 meters), climbing through forests of tall ponderosa pines, then dropping down to the “forest” of scattered, short junipers and piñon pines (gin and pine nuts, anyone?), before joining with Arizona 64 at Valle and turning due north.

It was at this point, between Valle and Tusayan, that we noticed the plume of smoke rising to our north. 

It wasn’t until the next day that we learned what the smoke was about.

We drove through the touristy town of Tusayan, just outside the park. It’s full of hotels, motels, restaurants, fast-food places, souvenir shops and tourist attractions. We went through without stopping, and went straight to Yavapai Lodge, where we were assigned room 7062 in building 4 at Yavapai West. Yavapai West is a 1970s oval of six one-story motel-style buildings, set in the woods, about a half-mile from the South Rim and about a mile east of Grand Canyon Village. The rooms are entered from the outside and you park your car directly in front of your door.

By now, it was late afternoon. We drove into the Village and eventually found parking in Lot C, which is south of the railroad tracks, toward the center of town. We walked up the hill, past the railroad station, by the El Tovar Hotel and Hopi House, and there was the Canyon. If you have never seen the Grand Canyon, I can’t describe it to you, nor can photographs do it justice. It is eleven miles wide, from rim to rim, and a mile deep. Down at the bottom, meandering through the eroded pinkish, brownish buttes (fancifully, called Isis Temple or Brahma Temple or Zoroaster Temple—the nineteenth-century romantic sensibility at work), is the Colorado River, only intermittently visible, if at all, from the rim.

We walked along, checking out the views, going into the Lookout Studio, from the terrace of which are views back to the El Tovar. Then we went on to the Kolb Studio, where brothers Emery and Elsworth Kolb had a photographic studio a century ago. There they developed photos of tourists riding mules into the Canyon down the adjacent Bright Angel Trail and showed the movie of their 1911-1912 trip all the way through the Canyon (around 300 miles). Now there was an art exhibit there, paintings of the Canyon. Nothing that will end up in the Louvre or the Met, but nice.

By the time we finished, it was dark, and time to go to the El Tovar’s restaurant, the best restaurant in the area, where we had a reservation for dinner at 6:15. We sat at a table with a view out the window to the Canyon, if we could see in the dark. Since we couldn’t see in the dark, we had to imagine what the view would look like. I ordered duck in a cherry-merlot sauce, while Mary Joy ordered a pasta dish. However, she didn’t care for it, so after a while we switched and were both pleased with our dinner.

Then we got onto the internet in the hotel lobby (rustic, with deer, elk and moose heads festooning the walls). When we left, there was a herd of mule deer grazing on the grass inside the hotel’s circular driveway. I had a flashlight with me, which was very useful as we walked across the railroad tracks and through the woods to our car.

We got back to Yavapai West in time to see the last three-and-a-half minutes of the Notre Dame-Oklahoma football game, a wonderful upset win for Notre Dame. Three years ago, our October weekend trip was to the Notre Dame-Washington game.  It was an exciting back-and-forth struggle in the rain, with three goal-line stands and Notre Dame winning in overtime after Washington tied the score on a last-second field goal.  We had good seats, high up, opposite the press box, but got rather wet.  I have wondered if video tapes of the game would show, up in the stands, amid the sea of blue Notre Dame Fighting Irish rain ponchos and purple Washington Huskies rain ponchos, a single red dot: Mary Joy's Wisconsin Badgers rain poncho.  This year, when I learned which weekend our October trip would be, I had (only 90% in jest) suggested to Mary Joy that it might be nice to spend that weekend in Norman, Oklahoma.  She was not amused.  In any case, I probably wouldn't have been able to get tickets.  Go, Irish!

And then, to bed.