Please note, I pinched this pic from the web. I can’t access my own from my camera and I didn’t think to use my phone! Sorry!
I had planned to do a hike in the Grand Canyon National Park but unfortunately the walk a had planned just wasn’t accessible without your own car. Much of my planning for the US has overestimated my ability to get around on public transport. It is possible to access the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas on day tours and I find one of those on the Internet. The tour includes a visit to Hoover Dam, one of the seven engineering wonders of the world.
The day starts at 5.30 with hotel pickup where we are delivered to centre to join the million other pickups! No, not again! Another ugly mass tourist experience. We’re herded onto as many huge buses as it takes and then we begin.
Hoover Dam manages the Colorado River near it’s source and the result is Lake Mead. The wall was built in the 1940’s to provide water and electricity mainly for California and to flood-control the river. The wall’s engineering and construction is legendary and the amazing story can be followed in a documentary available on ‘Seven Wonders of the Engineering World’ DVD. The wall is narrow but very deep and cleverly designed to withstand the tremendous forces concentrated on its structure. From memory its design was revolutionary for the times. Embedded is a hydro-electricity scheme.
This Colorado River that feeds Lake Mead is also the one that cuts through the Grand Canyon. The Colorado River has been very busy over the eons. She has persistantly carved her way through a landscape that is constantly lifting and the result, over a billion years in the making, is before my very eyes. This scenario is repeated so many times throughout the world but this geological example is just extraordinary. And the river is still hard at work crafting the canyon even further, visible by the chocolate colour of the water. I’m not alone of course, here with a billion other tourists from my tour and a million others, but if you just sit long enough they buzz around you for a while, then buzz off for some coke and fries. Then I have space to appreciate the enormity of what I am seeing. We are up on a plateau and it is nearly a sheer drop of about two kilometers! If you fell, you would hit a few bumps on the way down but not many. It’s windy and people get way to close to the edge for photo opportunities, some with umbrellas! Can you believe that? Amazingly nobody goes over the edge this time! There is an old guano mine perched at the very edge in one place. What was workplace health and safety like there?
We are on the western edge of the Grand Canyon. The canyon goes for 446 kilometers and is 30 kilometers wide in places. There are various access points to view the canyon. This western side has the glass-bottom bridge that you pay extra to walk out on and see straight down – completely unnecessary to my mind. There are helicopters and planes buzzing the canyon with high-paying sight-seers and you look down on them as they cruise the river. I counted at least sux helicopters and 10 planes back at the main camp, such is the enormity of the tourist business here. Many are in the air at the same time. How they manage all those is a mystery. It is also possible to access the Canyon from the South side and the north side but this western side is the most popular. We are on an Indian Reserve here and they take advantage with gift shops and food outlets. Why not, they should do well out of it.
About 20 minutes from the Canyon is a community out in the middle of nowhere. Apparently you can come out here and stake your multi-acre claim for free as long as you live on your block for seven years, without electricity or water! You have to provide your own. And they did. The community is complete with a school that goes through to highschool, medical centre and even hairdresser. This is in the middle of the desert!
We also pass through a forest of Joshua trees. These are a unique desert tree that only grows at a certain elevation and in few places in the world. They are so named because their branches raise upwards to the sky like arms lifted in some sort of spiritual gesture. I think they were named by the Mormons.
angusmccoll 