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Topic: Grand Canyon Advice...(??) (Read 2 times) previous topic - next topic
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Grand Canyon Advice...(??)
Yahoo Message Number: 86642
Maybe this is just a comment rather than advice...
We were just there around the end of September and happened to camp at the East end, The Desert View campground, which I haven't seen mentioned. We made a sudden and spontaneous decision to "see" the Grand Canyon because we were near..(Page, Arizona, which was an adventure, but I won't go into it).
First we wanted to go to the North rim...an aversion to crowds.. but it's such a long drive I called the reservation number to see if the campground could accommodate us. Pet Peeve: centralized reservation entities such as "Reserve America" are worthless if you need current information and it's virtually impossible to reach someone "on site" who can tell you about non-reservable sites. The woman I talked to couldn't even tell me if there were non-reservable sites, the only info she had was that all the reservable sites were full.
So we headed to the South Rim instead figuring there were a few more camping options. Got to the East end and pulled into Desert View campground on a cold, rainy afternoon...had no trouble finding a spot. The campground only had a few vehicles and we had our choice of sites. Then we went to the nearby visitor center area  and saw the Watchtower, a splendid Mary Coulter edifice that looked amazing against the broken clouds and stormy sky. If I could I'd send a photo of a rainbow over the Grand Canyon that I took there. The main drawback to that campground is the twenty mile drive to GC Village...
We did hike. We hiked a three mile round trip....to Cedar Point and back,  on the South Kaibab trail. It took us about six hours and we were so tired, that on the drive back to the campground, we got stopped by the park police for drunk driving. We were cold sober but driving slowly and not quite in a straight line. A man had gone missing from that trail while we were hiking it. We heard about it on the shuttle bus. I had picked that trail because for some reason I thought it wasn't used by mules. I was wrong. Hiking back up in the heat of the afternoon, the ammonia fumes from the patches of trail where the mules take their synchronized potty break, practically made me keel over. The mules have the right-of-way, btw, and you are supposed to step off trail and let them pass. There are places, quite a few, where I would exclaim, "Dang, I'd hate to meet the mules here." meaning there just wasn't anyplace to step off trail to.
And yes, even at the end of an acclimatizing month spent on the Colorado Plateau...all at pretty high elevation, that much exercise at 7000 plus feet is very stenuous, especially for a flatlander like me. Lexington, KY, where I live is under 1000 feet.
Bonnie in Lexington Zoe, red MB

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