On Sunday, October 28th, we got up early to go to 8:00 mass at El Cristo Rey Chapel, which claims to be the only Catholic Church in a national park in the whole country.
This is a small one-story building, probably not originally designed as a church, in the residential area, south of the tourist area in Grand Canyon Village. On the back wall of the sanctuary is a large mural of the Canyon.
The priest, who drives up from Flagstaff, gave a very nice homily, relating his experience with a detached retina to the day's gospel reading about Jesus curing the blind beggar. There is no organ or piano, so the only music was a couple of hymns a capella.
We hurried back to Yavapai Lodge, to eat a quick breakfast at the cafeteria there, the Canyon Cafe. French toast--edible, but not terrific.
Then we drove to Yavapai Point for the 9:30 ranger-led nature walk. On the walk up from the parking lot we met our docent, Ranger Ron, a burly sixty-year-old with a long, reddish beard, wearing the standard uniform and Smokey Bear hat. Later, he told us that he had spent most of his life working two jobs, but his wife had always wanted to be a park ranger, so when their son went off to college, so did they. He said that he loved this job, and intended to do it for as long as he could--he could do it in a motorized wheelchair if he had to.
We got started outside the Geological Museum, which was positioned at the viewpoint that scientists had decided was the best to show the Canyon's geological strata. Someone asked about the glass-floored overlook at the Hualapai Indian Reservation, 250 miles to the west. Ranger Ron said that he'd let us put our feet up on the windows here, if we wanted. Normally, this walk was about the plants and animals along the rim, but the ranger decided to take advantage of what was now happening on the North Rim. For the first time in seven years, conditions were exactly right for doing a "prescribed burn." He said that there is no such thing as a "controlled burn." A forest fire is like a child--you can manage it, but you can't control it. When it has rained enough to soak the trees, but the stuff on the ground has dried out, the Forest Service sets it on fire. This is to burn off the accumulated dried needles and undergrowth, to prevent large, disastrous fires. Before the white men arrived, the Indians would constantly set fire to anything that burned. They knew that fire was necessary to renew the vegetation and that new plants would attract deer and elk for hunting. Ponderosa pines have fireproof bark and like space (normally, a forest has only twenty per acre). Ranger Ron said that before we came along and stopped forest fires, a ponderosa pine forest would burn every five years or so, without getting hot enough to harm most of the trees. We could see the plumes of smoke rising on the North Rim. The South Rim has more piñon pine-juniper forests--a drier, scrubbier ecosystem, more averse to fire. It's harder to start burning, but once it does, it gets extremely hot and practically everything is burned up.
We did more listening than walking, but once the hour was over and the group broke up, we continued west along the Trail of Time, a walkway that translated distance into geological time. It starts out as one large step equalling a year, but eventually each step is equivalent to a million years. Pictures, diagrams and rock samples point out how the Canyon's geological strata are laid out. The Trail is interesting, educational and good exercise at the same time. We turned around when we got to where the trail to the Shrine of the Ages and Yavapai Lodge split off. We turned around and went back the 0.7 mile to Yavapai Point, where we looked through the Geological Museum. There is the half-circle of picture windows that Ranger Ron offered to let us put our feet on. On the window sill are tethered binoculars, allowing you to make out the Grand Canyon Lodge over on the North Rim, as well as the trees at Phantom Ranch, down at the bottom of the Canyon, and the little black suspension bridge that carries the South Kaibab Trail over the Colorado.
If you turn 180 degrees from the windows, you find yourself looking over a large model of the national park, the way it would appear if you were in a plane high above the Arizona-Utah border, looking south. The rest of the building is devoted to displays explaining the geology of the Canyon.
We drove back to the Canyon Cafe for lunch (lasagna, I think), then went back to our room for a short rest and to decide what to do next. We had been pondering the idea of going a short way into the Canyon on the Bright Angel Trail. Ranger Ron preferred the South Kaibab Trail. But if we were going to spend three hours on one of these trails (one hour down and two hours back up), we should probably have started earlier. So, instead, we took the Blue shuttle bus from the Market Plaza into and through the Village, to the Hermit's Rest Transfer stop at the west end of "downtown."
Hermit Road, the road along the rim west of the Village, out to Hermit's Rest, is not open to private automobile traffic during most of the year. The Park has addressed the horrific summer traffic problem on the South Rim by running free shuttle buses on three round-trip routes. They built the main Visitor Center, with several large parking lots, two miles east of the Village, at Mather Point. The Village or Blue Route runs from the Visitor Center through the Village, via the Market Plaza (where you may find the Post Office, the General Store and Yavapai Lodge). The Kaibab/Rim (Orange) Route goes east from Yavapai Point via the Visitor Center out to the South Kaibab trailhead and Yaki Point. The Hermit's Rest (Red) Route, the longest, runs the 7.7 miles west from the Village to Hermit's Rest.
We went about halfway, four miles out to the Abyss overlook. Needless to say, this is situated above an almost-vertical drop into the depths of the Canyon. From there, we hiked on the Rim Trail the 2.6 miles back to Maricopa Point, via Mohave Point, Hopi Point and Powell Point. This is a very pleasant,
extremely scenic walk, except for the last half mile, from Powell Point to Maricopa Point, which passes around the deserted workings of the Orphan Mine (which mined not orphans, but first gold, then, after World War II, uranium, until the late 1960s). We had to take a westbound bus from Maricopa Point in order to take the eastbound bus (which has fewer stops) from Powell Point back to the Village.
Once back in our room, I called El Tovar, to see if there would be parking available in their lot for dinner. They didn't recommend risking it, but suggested instead that we drive to the Shrine of the Ages and take the Blue shuttle bus from there. Westbound, that would only be one stop farther than "our" Market Plaza stop. The eastbound route, however is longer and more involved. Both east and west, however, the Shrine of the Ages is only one stop from El Tovar. We might have a long wait for the return bus, since by then the schedule would be down to two an hour, but that would be preferable to looking for the C parking lot in the dark again.
So we drove the short distance to the Shrine of the Ages (built originally as a nondenominational church, but now used mostly for various park programs), parked in their lot and waited for the bus. A short while after we got on, the driver pointed out elk in the woods by the road, then had to stop while a herd of mule deer crossed. The Shrine of the Ages, Market Plaza and the various buildings of Yavapai Lodge are set in a forest of ponderosa pine.
We got off the bus at the railroad station and climbed the hill to El Tovar. In the parking lot next to the hotel a car had its headlights on, pointed onto the lawn next to the broad front porch. Sitting there was a big bull elk. "Is that real?" asked Mary Joy. "Its ears moved," I replied. Otherwise, it was completely motionless, but every so often it flicked its ears. A man from the car with its lights on was on the sidewalk getting a picture. Unfortunately, I hadn't brought my camera. A car stopped in front to let people out. They were talking in a British accent. We pointed the elk out to them, and they excitedly called out to the driver, who was starting to drive off, to stop and see. The elk was unaffected by all this commotion, so we went in to dinner.
This time, instead of being by the windows, we were in the main dining room, by the fireplace. At a nearby table was a young British couple, on their honeymoon. I forget what we had for dinner, except that it was good--not great, but good.
They had made some changes to their WiFi, which wasn't working correctly yet, so we weren't able to access the Internet. We walked over to the Village East bus stop, just as a bus went by in the other direction, so we figured it would be a while before it finished its loop through the Village and got back to us. It was cold--probably in the low 40s. Maybe twenty minutes later we got on the bus. Seated there was a group of four women in full hiking gear, with heavy backpacks and high-powered lamps. They had just come out of the Canyon, in the dark. They had spent the previous night in the Canyon, but had been unable to reach the campground, because one of the group had leg cramps, so they had had to camp in the middle of the Bright Angel Trail. In the middle of the night, someone had come running down the trail, wearing a Batman costume, and had almost stumbled over one of the women in her sleeping bag. Something as overwhelmingly powerful as the Grand Canyon has strange effects on people.
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