Grand Canyon – North Rim

My experience at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon (click on the link for the South Rim post) was pretty amazing and I wasn’t sure the North Rim could top it. I was wrong. The enormity of the canyon is hard to absorb: it’s 10 miles across from south to north (as the crow flies), but you must travel 210 car miles to get from the south rim to the north rim of the canyon. The million acre park covers 277 miles of the Colorado River and has taken six million years of geological changes to become the Grand Canyon.

There will be several posts of my recent trip to Arizona and Utah. It’s taken many months to get through processing the photos and when I started choosing which ones to go into the post(s), I ran into trouble. My friend Mary had requested pics so as to make up her mind about which rim to visit during an upcoming trip. Gosh, how to decide which beautiful view to display. We arrived from Virgin River Campground during the afternoon of a two day stay at the Grand Canyon and quickly organized ourselves to take advantage of Sunset, Day One at Point Imperial.

This was the first glimpse of the canyon. At this point, I didn’t realize there were people on those rocks ahead (check the enlargement below).

It looks a little like that natural bridge is sagging, but I walked on it and survived! One difference between the south rim and north rim is the elevation. The south rim at 7,000′ is dryer and hotter than the north rim at 8,000′ to 8,800′. You can often see thunderstorms to the north from the sunnier south rim.

Because it had recently been raining and flooding in Utah (just north of the park), the green in the park was an unexpected bonus.

This pic is an enlarged view of the one above it.

Looking to the west, the sun is getting low in the sky.

An enlargement of the pic above. The green looked like velvet.

Mountains in the distance . . .

Looking to the west again, and yes, you could walk right off the top here, no guardrails.

The Harvest moon is nearly full – the next evening was a full moon AND an eclipse.

The way the walls curve in this pic back toward the trees in the lower right side of the photo started me thinking about how quickly geology changes. The walls in the center of the photo are so slim – how much longer will they stand before eroding away?

As you can see from the little bits of gold sunshine, the canyon is almost entirely in shadow. The colors were amazing. While getting the post ready, I had to keep going back and looking at the date and times of the photos, to make sure they were in the right order. That’s what happens when you wait four months to post a blog! Stay tuned for more.