Vegas and the Canyons, 2018, day three
Driving to the South Rim
Powered by vegan donuts, we were ready for the road trip to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Our family has conquered many multi-day road trips now. The best memories often come from the small detours, the unexpected discoveries, or the quirky local restaurants. We still talk about the surprise waterfall in Oregon, the cozy riverside cafe in Squamish, and the Florida parking lot posted with warnings about venomous snakes. Backed by this experience, I can confidently tell you that the route between Vegas and the Grand Canyon is pretty freakin’ boring. Okay, yes, there’s Hoover Dam. We also located Sandy’s elusive American toothpaste in a Safeway. Those are the highlights.
Travellers between this part of Nevada and Arizona used to need to drive over Hoover Dam. After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. accelerated the construction of a new bridge to bypass the dam. The bypass, the Mike O’Callaghan — Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, is itself a feat of engineering that met a lean budget of USD 240 million, far less expensive than recent B.C. projects.
We climbed a series of steep staircases onto the bypass to look down on Hoover Dam.
As we walked back to the car, we saw the welcome sign for the state we were leaving.
(Time zones were messy on this trip. Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon use the same time as home, but Utah was an hour later. Navajo land in Arizona was also an hour later, but our canyon tour on Navajo land used Arizona time, and thus was the same time as home. Some of our electronic devices automatically changed times as we travelled and some didn’t. One clock in our Utah home didn’t match any of these times and was simply wrong.)
Onward to the South Rim.
The terrain would tease scenery now and then, but mostly it reminded us of Kamloops.
We detoured onto Route 66 to visit Seligman, a small town said to have inspired the movie Cars.
Delgadillo’s Snow Cap was cute and my malted chocolate was tasty. Unfortunately, a tour bus had pulled into this tiny french-fry shop right before we arrived, so the line was a slog.
We left the interstate and headed north toward the Grand Canyon.
I’d bought our Grand Canyon entry pass in advance, because I’d read that people with passes could use an express lane to enter the park. On this October afternoon, the express lane was closed and there was no wait. As we drove past the gatehouse, I saw a handwritten sign saying “Highway 89 CLOSED.”
Wait, what? Highway 89 was the highway we would need to continue our trip after the Grand Canyon. A flash flood had washed it out, and repairs were going to take multiple days. Dread over having to backtrack for four hours to find a detour threatened to hang over our whole stay. Happily, the heroes in the Arizona Department of Transportation fixed the highway faster than expected. It was open by next morning.
The roads on the South Rim loop around like a knotted shoelace, and parking is scarce. We parked a ways from our hotel and the canyon edge, but finally got our first glimpse of the Grand Canyon.
Our hotel was in Grand Canyon Village, a collection of modest buildings strung along the edge of the canyon, some dating back to 1901. Our hotel, Thunderbird Lodge, was from 1968.
Back in Las Vegas, the hotels don’t provide coffee makers or fridges, they booby trap the room with snacks that sell themselves to you if you jostle them, and they layer on fees for mandatory features like having a floor. It was relaxing to be in a normal room with basic amenities, where your door led directly to the outside. You could see the canyon from our window.
A walkway runs for miles along the rim with views at every step.
Many of the buildings in the park were designed by Mary Colter in the early 1900s to look like rustic native and Spanish structures.
Here’s a close up of Lookout Studio on the ledge. The building’s rubble-stone style continues into the wall and ledges, blending the structure into the canyon.
We explored the neighbourhood as the sun set.
When the sun went down, the village dropped quickly into the cold and dark. We brought flashlights to find our way to dinner at El Tovar, the dining room that has been serving tourists for over 100 years.
Next up: Hiking in the canyon
Thanks for reading! Here are the photos collected in an album and here is page one of this story.
