We drove 5 hours to the Grand Canyon on Friday night and camped at Mather Campground. There was still snow on the ground, but we found a dry-ish spot to set up the tent. Then we got up early Saturday and realized we were in a forest. Who knew that the grand canyon had huge trees pretty close to the edge. We hiked the Grandview Point Trail to the west point of Horseshoe Mesa. It was about 9 miles round trip and 2760 ft of elevation. We got to see the sunrise over the canyon which was pretty awesome.
The trail had snow for about half of the time we were hiking. We took our crampons and were happy we had them because the trail was pretty icy in places. This was an old mining trail for a copper mine, so it had some interesting spots like this log part.
There's no real way to show how big the grand canyon is. We hiked 4 1/2 miles in and the other rim never looked any closer. It was too far to go to the river in just a day hike (we were about half-way to it). Its huge!
This was the biggest one of these plants we have seen, usually they are about half this size. Does anyone know what this is? It might be some type of Yucca plant, but I can't figure it out.
Here we are at the tip of Horseshoe Mesa.
We were hiking down and came upon this sign... weird. There were lots of yellowish rocks around, so we think it was uranium.
It was another great weekend trip!
1 comment:
I love the Grand Canyon. Looks like another great adventure. We got 8 inches of snow yesterday, so I feel like I need crampons just getting the mail.
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