Day 20 - Williams to Grand Canyon National Park, South Rim

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Weather:  Sunny and high 60’s to low 70’s - perfection!

Steps: Shaun - 14,843, Shannon - 13,798

So I know this will come as a shocker, but there’s a bit of a story surrounding our reservation with the Grand Canyon Railway. Keep in mind that we booked this entire trip in July of 2017 for a May 2018 trip. This is pretty typical for us, and then we always verify all the arrangements a couple of months before the actual trip, just to make sure everything’s okay. For this trip, we chose to make our calls in March, and Shannon took the first half and I took the last half, and everything appeared to be okay (except for the aforementioned car rental situation where they wanted to charge us $400 to change our reservation by 2 hours...just sayin’). Anyway, the two of us happened to be together for Shannon’s birthday in March, and we decided to do a last check through everything. Luckily, Shan noticed that our confirmation info for the train was incomplete. We decided to call them to check everything out, and it’s really good that we did because not only was the reservation messed up but we hadn’t made arrangements for our luggage and we had no method of transportation other than the shuttle. Once we worked that out, the human on the phone also pointed out that there were packages set up specifically for train travelers to make their day at South Rim more efficient. The one we chose included lunch when we arrived at noon and then an evening bus ride to the best views of the sunset. The moral of the story is that it’s better to actually speak to a person rather than taking your chances with the internet. We don’t take this advice very often, but, in this case, if we hadn’t had to call to straighten out the reservation, we would have had to schlep our luggage all over God’s creation...on a shuttle, no less...and we’d have missed the chance to hear Amazing Grace played on a Navajo pipe by Shirley Struble’s doppelganger (more on that story later).

We spent the money for a glass-domed first class car on the train (that could only be accessed from the last car) named for Mary Colter who was the architect of the Watchtower and many buildings in and around the Grand Canyon. We were really excited to see the scenery, so after eating breakfast at a little café in town (bad idea), we drove to the train depot, left our luggage on the schlepping cart to be taken to Yavapai Lodge, and went inside to pick up our tickets, grab some tea (because the tea was awful from the café...note the foreshadowing we should have picked up on), and had our way with the gift shop.

Once we boarded the train, we got a bit to eat and drink (since they were included in our ticket price) and sat back to enjoy the 90-minute ride. Within about 10 minutes, though, Shannon was looking a bit green. She tried drinking some ginger ale, but she just got worse and worse until she finally had to avail herself of the facilities. Despite emptying her stomach, Shannon still felt horrible, so she ended up going downstairs and curling up on the couch down there. The nice stewards gave her ginger ale, bitters, and two blankets, and she missed the horrible train robbery skit and the photo op the train provided. Shaun stayed upstairs and read and listened to the banjo guy playing sing-along songs.

There wasn’t a lot of wildlife hanging around the tracks, but we did see a coyote cruising across a field, so that was pretty cool. The best part of the journey were the stewards though. There was a man who was a lifelong resident of the area, and we even got to see his home from the train. The woman steward was very personable, and she did a great job getting everyone involved in the entertainment by singing along, dancing in the aisles, and making sure everyone had food and drinks every inch of the way. They made sure we all knew where to go and what to do once we arrived, and they offered up their own tourist books for folks to read on the trip. With the exception of the whole puking thing, it was a great trip!

When we got off the train, we had to decide what to do about whatever was making Shan sick, so we decided to walk to the clinic since it wasn’t on the shuttle route. Little did we know that it was almost 2 miles away, so it was a really miserable trip. We did see a woodpecker and an Abert squirrel along the way, so that was something. An Abert squirrel is a unique squirrel species from the area that has tufts of hair coming out of their ears, and they’re super cute.

Once we got to the clinic, they tested her pulse oxygen thinking that she was suffering from either elevation sickness or dehydration. To make a VERY long story short, the consensus was that she had gotten food poisoning from the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich she got from the café in Williams (the venue of the crappy tea). They gave her an anti-nausea pill and sent us on our way.  Luckily, one of the nurses called a car to take us back to the rim and to the restaurant where we had to eat lunch by 2:00 as part of our package at Bright Angel Lodge. We got picked up at 1:45, so we made it...barely. Of course, Shan didn’t eat a whole lot, but she did feel better once she got some non-toxic food in her.

The only documentation we have of this long, sad story are these two pictures from the clinic believe it or not.  Aren’t they pretty?

Ok, back to our regularly scheduled day at the South Rim....we had a few hours before the bus trip began at 5:00, so we walked along the South Rim and the Bright Angel Trailhead and saw the main buildings in that part of the park. This included the El Toro Hotel (which was designed by the same person who designed the Riordan House that we toured in Flagstaff) and a couple more of Mary Colter’s creations: Bright Angel Lodge, where we had lunch, Hopi House, Hermits Rest, and Kolb and Lookout Studio. We saw an interesting exhibit about the Kolb brothers at the studio and wished we were independently wealthy so that we could buy a glorious piece of art we found there.

A cool wildlife moment happened as we were gazing into the canyon from Lookout Studio...there was a teeny tiny hummingbird feeding on the persimmon below the wall, and he was so cute!  Along came a bigger one who tried to bully him out of the way, but the little fellow wasn’t having any of that crap and drove the big guy away. Even in nature, bullies never win!

Lookout Studio: 

Bright Angel Lodge

View from start of Bright Angel Trail

Phantom Ranch

Once our time was up, we caught the shuttle to Maswik Lodge to catch the Hermit’s Rest Sunset Tour. It turned out the tour used one of the big buses, but there were only 19 of us, so we had lots of room to spread out. We also met up with many of the people we had met on the train, and they all asked after Shannon’s welfare, which was really nice.

As I mentioned before, the tour guide was a very unique woman who reminded us so much of Shirley Struble. She was full of great stories and information on the geology, history, and people of the area. She was the first person to give us an understanding of why the national parks we had seen looked so different from each other even though they were located relatively near each other. She said it was all a matter of the timeframe exposed in the rocks:

1) Bryce Canyon is the youngest park, so the rock exposed is the highest in elevation at almost 10,000 feet above sea level.  The bottom of Bryce Canyon is the top of Zion.

2) Zion is the next youngest, and the bottom of Zion is the top of the Grand Canyon.

3) The Grand Canyon is the oldest, and the bottom of the Grand Canyon contains the oldest exposed rock in the world.

Interesting huh? The other piece of the pie is that all the area in the Colorado Plateau was once the bottom of the ocean, and you can find placed all along the rim where fossils are revealed to tell the story. Pseudo Shirley took us to a couple of examples on the rim, and she also cautioned us to never go out beyond the safety barrier because the sandstone is just waiting to fall beyond it. In her opinion, when it happens, it’s not going to be a small crumble...she pointed out cracks and fissures all over the area to illustrate where the break will happen. She definitely made an impression, not only with her wealth of information but also with her practical application of that knowledge.

Bus driver who reminded us of Shirley Struble:

While perusing the fossils, we noticed that the people in the group weren’t paying attention to the guide but looking in the opposite direction. She finally caught on to the fact that there was a pregnant elk grazing in the trees about 25 yards away. She cautioned everyone to stay back because elk are very unpredictable, and a pregnant one is even more dangerous, so we all took our pictures and left her to her dinner. We also saw some mule deer, but after the pregnant elk, the deer were much less exciting.

The bus stopped at a couple overlooks of the canyon before arriving at the end of the line at Hermit’s Rest.  This was a seriously cool Mary Colter production, and we had cookies, tea, hot chocolate, and an intimate relation with a raven.  Ravens were a ubiquitous presence throughout this whole trip, so we decided to honor this one with a photographic gallery.

Hermits Rest

Sunset

After our bus tour was over, we were delivered back to Maswik Lodge where we had to wait quite a while for the shuttle to come to take us to our room at Yavapai. Once the sun set, it got cold quickly, and I was really uncomfortable. Luckily, the shuttle came eventually and dropped us right at the lodge, so we checked in and ate dinner at the buffet in the restaurant. It was a short hike to our cabin, but it was dead dark and we had no idea where we were going, so it was quite an adventure. Luckily, our luggage had indeed been delivered to the room, so we basically collapsed in a heap and went to bed early.