Grand Canyon South Rim, Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Up bright and very early with the time change, we had a genuinely excellent breakfast in the cafe in the lodge. Here’s an early morning iPhone shot from the Rim.
We started with a walk along the rim to the trailhead of the Bright Angel Trail, the most heavily used of the three trails to the river. Here is the crew ready for come what may!
This was originally the home and studio of a pair of photographers who were brothers.
And this is Connie and Vladimir’s “cabin,” with spectacular views out over the canyon.
We then boarded a park shuttle bus that takes the visitor to nine viewpoints to the west of Grand Canyon Village; although I had been here several times over the years, I had never seen the canyon from so many remarkable angles!
The shuttle along the “Red Route” makes nine stops at viewpoints; some are right along the access road, some are up to a few hundred yards distant. All are spectacular, and each one reveals something slightly different about the canyon.
At the bottom center is the Bright Angel Trail on the plateau just before it plunges to the river through Granite Gorge.
The canyon slopes from north to south, so that rainwater tends to carve the rock below the north rim more quickly than that below the south rim. The result is that some of the most spectacular “temples”—freestanding buttes—are in full view across the canyon.
As we traveled westward, more views down to the river began to open up. It’s that blue sliver just below the center of the image.
This is the view straight down into the side canyon called “The Abyss.”
The last stop, Hermit’s Rest, offers a snack bar, where we restocked our water bottles and had a bite before jumping on the shuttle back to the village.
We lazed around a bit, recovering from the sun and altitude, then climbed aboard a “Sunset Tour.” This was a bit of a blunder on my part. When I booked the tour, I was under the impression that we would visit viewpoints east of the village. Wrong. But it worked out all right. Our guide was extremely informative, and we saw another side of the canyon and its ecosystem.
The landscape looked very different bathed in the softer light of late afternoon. And the lengthening shadows thrown by the setting sun provided a new sense of drama.
We finished our day at Mohave Point, where we watched the sunset over the eastern walls.
We had a really nice dinner at the El Tovar, the fancier lodging right on the rim. I had Elk Bolognese; I’ll admit I couldn’t tell it was elk, but it was tasty.
This was my first visit to the El Tovar since I was forced to sleep on the lobby floor in 1969. I had hiked to the river with two friends in February; as we started to walk up the Bright Angel Trail, we were met with what was to that point the worst blizzard of the twentieth century. Emerging on the south rim, we had neither a tent nor money, and there was two feet of snow on the ground. So the three of us and another half dozen hikers bedded down in front of the great fireplace. The hotel manager wanted us to sleep in the snow and sent a staff member around every hour to shine a flashlight in the eyes of the dozen or so stranded hikers!