I have not forgotten about the second part of Day 4….I have either deleted or seriously missplaced the video that I want to use and haven’t gone on a full search for the video. Maybe tonight
If pictures of rocks aren’t your thing than this post will be verrrry boring.
Sunrise Panorama at the Canyon.
Sunrise Panorama at the Canyon Part 2
After breakfast we headed out again on the bus to the Herman’s Rest Route to get a small hike/walk in before we drove out. We went all the way to the end, to Herman’s Rest, and then walked back to Pima Point
A panorama from Hermit’s Rest….you can see Kevin and Mom off on the left….
Rapids on the Colorado River visible down below. It’s about here that I did something that would come back to bite me later…..yet another reminder that if you give a boy a rope he’ll have a noose in his hand soon enough.
There are warnings, both verbal and written, everywhere…..do not throw rocks over the edge because there might be hikers below. When we went out to Herman’s Rest we were well away from any trails that led down to the bottom, so, as we walked back towards Pima Point I told each of the boys to go for it….grab one rock and throw it as far as you can. Of course, the boys were dying to do this, and enjoyed listening and listening to hear it hit the sides and bounce toward the bottom…..
After Pima Point we took the bus back to the main portion of the visitor complex and the boys and I hiked just-a-little-way down into the Canyon, so that boys could say that they hiked even-if-just-a-little-bit down into the Canyon.
We passed these burros on the way up….they were slow but better suited for the walk back up then I was.
You can see the trail across the way that heads down…and down, and down, and hours later gets to the river. We didn’t get that far.
We stopped here. And I took this picture of the boys, and then used the phone and called Mom to let her know we were on the way back up so that she could take a picture of us at the arch-tunnel that is between the top and here.
As I talk to Mom, the boys sit down or stand around, and I literally am on the phone long enough to tell her we are heading back up when this old guy turns to Fric and Frac and says “Hey, don’t throw a rock…there’s hikers down there!”.
Tell Mom “Bye!”, turn around and look at Fric and Frac and say ‘what the heck are you doing???’. It’s not Fric (Cpher), it’s all Frac….and he has this stupid I-don’t-know face on him. Old man is just going on and and on and on about it, I’m about as mortified as I can be but by the end of it I’m a little pissed off with the old man, who just won’t shut up and let me handle it.
Suzanne, of course, says I enabled this by letting them throw the rocks over the edge earlier (it’s my fault, not Matthew’s). I looked at Matthew after this statement and made sure he knew that I didn’t think it was anyone’s fault but the little kid who picked up the rock…..
Always a fun time with the boys!
The rest of the Canyon time was taking the Desert View road to the East to the leave the park…..there are multiple scenic points to stop at along the way.
There’s this one….
and this one….
and this one….
You get the picture….we leave the park around noon, and instead of heading back west and backtrack the way we came, we decide (ok, I decided) to head out of the park to the east and go south into Flagstaff and then head west….
Part of the reason we headed out that way was to stop at the Wupatki National Monument just north of Flagstaff…this is a Hopi Pueblo, and it was pretty neat seeing the building and the other structures….
Two pueblos actually, and a circle for sports and gatherings…..
The other attraction in this area is the Sunset Volcano National Monument (you can drive from Wupatki to Sunset in 20 minutes….please note that the landscape looks completely different…). The volcano went off in 1000-1100 AD, and you can still see ash, sand, and lava flows everywhere…..
No picture of Sunset Volcano (it’s directly behind me at this point) BUT the sun literally was right behind the volcano and no picture was going to work out under those conditions. Even this picture is iffy…..basically everything you can see in shadows here is a giant lava flow, tens of feet high and hundreds of feet wide……
Drove back to Vegas, arrived around 7 pm, had a pretty quiet night before Thanksgiving.
