15th day: Hopping over to the Grand Canyon

After an other night in an other road motel, we drove around in the Monument Valley protected national reserve. The ground actually still belongs to the Navajo indians and they collect money for entering the area. Indians living here are not like you would imagine looking at the movies or documentaries. They don t have their pride anymore, they don t have anything to do around here, so they just hanging around and most of them are alcholic.

From here is only a few hours drive to arrive at the eastern regions of the Grand Canyon, which we reached in the afternoon. On the way there we made a short turnout to the Glenn Canyon dam and its famous bridge. You can recall this bridge from several movies, like the Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger or The natural born killers.

The Grand Canyon  is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River. President Theodore Roosevelt was a major proponent of preservation of the Grand Canyon area, and visited it on numerous occasions to hunt and enjoy the scenery. It is considered one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. The Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile (6,000 feet or 1,800 metres). Nearly two billion years of the Earth's geological history has been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries cut their channels through layer after layer of rock while the Colorado Plateau was uplifted.

 

 There are several activities organised around the canyon, but due lack of time we just drove around along the rim and enjoyed the scenery. I like to note that I didn t enjoyed it that much as the Bryce canyon a day before. You just loose the overview, because of its size. Probably it is more fun if you go down to the bottom of the canyon and spend a night there in a tent and come out via the river on a raft bought. Unfortunately we didn have the time for that.

More pics
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