grand canyon – Wanderer Photography

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North Rim – Grand Canyon

Posted on May 20, 2014 in Travel

After the day in Zion National Park – which was awesome, BTW – we took a detour and spent the night in St. George (funny thing – Romania has a city with that name as well).

The plan for the next day was to visit the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, go further East and then go over the Colorado river (which is to blame for all of this), head back west, stop at the South Rim just in time for sunset and drive further West to Las Vegas. Well, that didn’t quite turned out as planned, but it was fun.

So, we woke up around 8, left St. George around 9 and drove to North Rim. North Rim is about 150 miles or 3 hours away from St. George. The road is really interesting – unfortunately I have no pictures as I was driving. There are a couple of straight lines, with nothing in sight for miles and a speed limit of 60 mph. For the most part, we stayed around that limit, but sometimes it really feels like in the movies, going through the desert at 90+F (32C) and getting bored. Luckily, only parts of the road were straight lines in the desert.

So, what is North Rim? Well, as the name says, it is the North rim of the Grand Canyon (thank you Captain Obvious). The Grand Canyon is actually so wide in some places that they needed to make a difference in where you are. The main difference between the northern rim and the southern rim is that the North Rim is at a higher altitude and is more “foresty” while the South Rim is at a lower altitude and drier. Most of the pictures that you will see of the sunset are actually taken at the South Rim, as that is closer to the Colorado river. As I was saying, the Colorado river is the main thing to blame for this huge natural attraction (and I do mean huge), alongside with the rocks and the relief inside the canyon. In fact, the Grand Canyon is so big that to get from the North Rim to the South Rim – which is about 5 miles in SLD (straight line distance) – you need about 4 hours worth of driving (even better, when we were there some of the roads were closed, so it would have been a 5+h drive).

Anyway, too much talking… we got there at 12 and started visiting. This is one of the first sights that we got of the Grand Canyon. And boy, is it steep.

I am in general not very afraid of heights – but here, I had to keep away from the edge quite a bit. This was facing East and you can already see that there are quite a bit of trees around. After 20 minutes, we got to a southern lookout:

Again, you can see that I am not too close to the edge here either – I am not that crazy. Still the view was nothing short of impressive. It was one of those things that you see them on TV, you see it in the pictures… but unless you are there, you can’t quite get the full experience. Being able to see every detail of the mountain, so many curvatures, so many lines going in different directions, so much 3D (that you can’t actually get on camera) – this is the experience that I got from the Grand Canyon.

A bit closer to the eeeeeedgeeee.

And then there was a top-of-the-rock that you could climb (name is Bright Angel Point). Looking East towards the foresty part and mom in the foreground.

And then, switching towards South, putting my sexy, beautiful, burn from Hawaiian sun legs in the picture (also on top of Bright Angel Point).

What? No? I don’t have sexy legs?

We walked around a bit more and decided to be hipsters – got a selfie of the 3 of us (hipsters because this is from last year, before selfies were cool – if in doubt, search for “ellen degeneres oscars selfie 2014”).

Of course, the rock is there for artistic composition. At this point, it was around 2PM and we had a choice to make – drive 5-6h to the South Rim, watch the sunset and another 3-4h to Las Vegas or visit most of the stuff in the North Rim and head back the same way to St. George and to Vegas. We chose the second option, as it would allow us to see more rather than just go to the more touristy, most likely crowded South Rim (reference: this is on Saturday, the 6th of July, on the 4th of July long weekend, so we expected South Rim to be really crowded).

So, we made our way to the other two viewpoints: Point Imperial and Cape Royal. Cape Royal was the first one.

This place provides a more in-depth view of the Grand Canyon. As you can see, the weather also turned quite a bit, but it was not raining – so we got to take a picture. Another selfie:

Then I decided to take some pictures with the phone – I am not quite sure why and I am pretty sorry for the quality (they could use a bit of work).

Nearby, it started raining – you can see in the picture below and we witnessed some lightning strikes that went down in the canyon. Come to think of it, I believe it was safety that made me decide not to use the camera – afraid to put the camera on the metal tripod or on the railing.

Some of us were pretty … electric.

Apparently, the bad weather was creating a lot of static energy at this place, causing my mom’s hair to go … cuckoo!

Then my artistic experiment thingie went off and decided that a lonely tree on the edge of the Grand Canyon would be a worthy shot. I think it looks pretty cool in black-and-white, but I think that there are a conditions and a subject requirements to take a b&w picture. The requirements would be a cloudy sky and a solitary subject – but again, this is one of the few b&w pictures.

We stopped a couple of times no the way between the Cape Royal and Imperial Point and took more pictures. The field of view already got smaller and smaller due to the rain that was far away and less light. That actually benefited some of the contrasts between the red of the canyon and the dark of the sky: