The Grand Canyon - South

Miles Thursday: 148

Hours in the saddle: 4:15

Today we went to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. It was pretty spectacular. Just like they say. 

On the way there, we saw a sign for a "Watchable Wildlife" area. It reminded us of a sign on a neighborhood in a DC suburb for a "Livable Community". I guess that’s the best they can do. 

Tomorrow we will go north and then will check out the north rim. 90% of the 5M annual visitors to the Grand Canyon go to the south rim. It’s more developed and closer to the highway. And it shows...Jaron used the word "Disney world". Seriously, it was very peopley and crowded, just like the travel book said it would be. We walked ~1.5 mi total along the paved rim trail. We were sitting and enjoying the view when a dad found his daughters near us and berated them for running off, and now he didn’t know where mom was and she wasn’t answering her phone. (We had 2 bars of LTE out there.) One daughter kept explaining that they left because the parents were taking a selfie. Everyone repeated themselves a lot, with feeling. So we found another overlook that was more precarious and had no guardrails and nobody bothered us. A couple of people took pictures behind us but they were not overly loud and that was it. 

We went to a geology museum and spent some time trying to understand how the Grand Canyon was formed. It was crowded, so we went back outside and walked back. 

We decided to change one of the plans we made yesterday and will try dispersed camping this weekend since all of the campgrounds are full, and we really want to camp. There are areas in the national forest designated for dispersed camping, whick is what it sounds like - random forest, and leave no trace. So we talked to a ranger about the very few regulations on doing that. 

On the way up and back, we had to deal with some irresponsible drivers. There were two minivans gone wild doing very irresponsible passing. The second one was coming the opposite direction from us passing on a two lane road, and we had to slam on our brakes and go on to the shoulder so that he could pass 3 cars in a no passing zone. I figure that there were a lot of impatient people who are not used to driving on country roads. 

So that’s a lot of whining, but it was a good day. Just very peopley. 

Edit: We’ll be going off the grid again, so I may not post for a few days. You can check the Spot beacon page posted on the first blog for this trip for signs of life in the meantime.