The Grand Canyon. It's Quite Grand.

Short Version:
Mormon knowledge, a walk in a bloody big ditch. A band that wasn't, a crippled meatophile, color-coded geological history, snow. And it's all OCD-friendly!

Long Version:
Neither of us had heard of Pipe Springs National Monument, but we were passing, and had a pass, so we stopped. We were glad we had, because we learned more about the Mormons (in whose State we'd been frolicking for the past month) in an hour than we had in all the time we spent in Utah*. My favorite thing was the revolving shelving unit; Nene liked the horse. I didn't get to feed a peppermint to the shelving unit though. There were Texas Longhorn cattle in a pen (they have long horns) and some seriously crazy ducks in the tree-lined pond, and then there was cheap gas at the Indian-owned station and we were off again, through Fredonia and Kanab and on into Page, where we ate uninspiring fast-food burritos sold to us by an incredibly enthusiastic young chap with quite bad skin.

Weird stuff had been happening on the road, with several mouse-like critters attempting crossings with varying degrees of success. The chaos ratcheted up a notch just after Antelope Pass when a pickup pulled out in front of us as we blasted along at just under the 65mph speed limit. We managed to not die, then disappeared off into the Kaibab National Forest to camp in a grove of somewhat bedraggled trees, with a planned early start for Grand Canyon day.

And an early start it was, although "early" is not the thing it'll be remembered for: it was COLD! Frozen windows and water-bottles.

The watch-tower at the Desert View Lookout hadn't opened for the day before we moved on to the next spot, and it was still chilly as we wandered aroud the ruined Indian village. Eventually we found a lookout with sun, and with minimal wind, and we breakfasted while looking out over what really is an amazing spectacle. Pictures don't do the place justice. The canyon is absolutely immense: it averages ten miles across and is over a mile deep in places, and the rocks in the lower reaches have been dated as being over 1800-million years old. They're dark grey. The geological history of the place is exposed in the cliff walls, and color-coded for your convenience: a band of cream amongst the orange here; a series of dark stripes a few hundred feet lower; a giant green shelf halfway down where harder rock has arrested the effects of erosion and has been colonised by hardy scrub.

We weren't the only early risers already on the move; others included:
- The Amerikan couple who emigrated to Williams Lake (for goodness' sake, why?). They were turned away at the US border last time they came back for a visit because they had their pet cockatoo with them.
- The Anglo-Amerikan couple from North Carolina. He spent twelve years and fifty-thousand dollars jumping through immigration hoops in pursuit of US citizenship. They told us about the Horseshoe Mesa hike, a few stops further along the way, and said that they'd been told it was worth exploring.

Having now done the Horseshoe Mesa hike, we concur.

There was an incredible amount of signage at the top of the trail, much of it safety-oriented, and geared towards making people not die as a result of heat- or water-related issues. We had plenty of water, and the chill wind was still blowing so we had our packs full not only with delicious foods but also with numerous hard-weather garments.

We set off at 11:11, down a steep and sketchy path. It got steeper and sketchier. We met a group of men on their way out from a multi-day trip. From all across the southern States of the US, they've been doing an annual hiking trip for thirty years. We told them they should come hike in NZ. We also met some interesting folks from non-Chicago Illinois (I never knew there was anything else there), and then we met the not-band.

Two Australians and three Brits, dressed in an assortment of styles appropriate for pretty much any urban setting you could name. They didn't look very much like hikers, but did look very much like a British band out filming a video, albeit one that's several hours long and doesn't change much. As one of the Australians said when it was mentioned, they must be a prog rock band.

We hiked about halfway down into the canyon, past the orange and the cream and the brown sections, and the light grey and the crimson-and-yellow. Not long after the translucent green, we were on the flat, and making our way out along the western arm of Horseshoe Mesa to the end, where we found wonderful, awe-inspiring views in all directions, including not only along and along, but also up and down. And then we got to walk back up.

As we'd hiked down, we'd turned occasionally and looked back up at what we'd clambered down. It looked cool. Once we'd turned at our end point and started walking back up, though, it no longer looked quite so excellent; it looked, more than anything, like a bloody hard slog waiting to be done. The path was visible only very occasionally, but what was plain at all times was that it went up. And up. And up. The signs at the top had told us to budget 2-3 times as long to do the return climb as we spent hiking down, which meant we were looking at 4-6 hours of climbing. Yikes.

Then it started to snow.

Then we met the carnivore. He was haranguing the Australians about being anemic because of their vegetarianism. He was bemused when told that we were vego also: "But you have color in your cheeks!" he cried. He was then left far behind on the climb up out of the canyon; a fact which was originally upheld as exemplarising the power of eggplant, but which we suspect may actually have had something to do with the fact that he was mildly twisted, physically speaking, and incapable of striding or even scuttling with any great speed. Didn't stop him yelling "MEAT!" at us every time he caught sight of us as we made our way up through the switchbacks on the steepest part of the climb. We yelled "BEANS!" back at him.

The more obsessive-compulsive among you will be pleased to note that, having set off at 11:11, it took us 2 hours and 22 minutes to get to the end of the western arm of Horseshoe Mesa, and we arrived back at the van at 16:11, exactly five hours after we left. In addition, our last gasoline purchase, back on the Paiute Indian Reservation at Pipe Springs, was $55.55. Feel better now?








* = Apparently the Mormon Church wanted to call the state Deseret, which may or may not have a meaning to do with honeybees of some sort, but the Federal Government, which didn't like the Mormons much at all, overruled them and named it Utah after the Ute Indians who'd lived there before the polygamists moved in