The Rough Guide to the Grand Canyon (Miniguides) (Paperback)

While no one is disappointed with their first stunning sight of the chasm, visitors often find themselves struggling to understand what can appear as a remote and impassive spectacle. They race frantically from viewpoint to viewpoint, constantly imagining that the next one will be the "best," the place from which the whole thing finally makes sense. This book is an attempt to guide you beyond that initial anxiety. More than anything, it’s aimed at encouraging you to slow down, to appreciate whatever small portion of the canyon may be displayed in front of you at any one moment, and to allow enough time for the bigger picture to develop. You don’t have to learn the names of all those buttes and mesas – dubbed Shiva Temple, Wotan’s Throne and so on in a spate of late-Victorian fervor – and you may not ever be able to identify all the different rock strata or desert plants. The longer you spend at the canyon, however, the greater the chance that you will start to hear it speak.

Back in the 1920s, the average visitor would stay at the canyon for two or three weeks. These days, two or three hours is more typical, of which perhaps forty minutes are spent actually looking at the canyon. That’s partly because most people now arrive by car. As the only part of the canyon you can reach in a car is the rim, seeing the canyon has thus come to mean seeing it from above, from a distance. If you really want to engage with the canyon, however, you need literally to get into it – to hike or ride a mule down the many inner-canyon trails, to sleep in the backcountry campgrounds or in the cabins at Phantom Ranch on the canyon floor, to raft through the whitewater rapids of the river itself.

Mapping and defining precisely what constitutes the "Grand Canyon" has always been controversial; Grand Canyon National Park covers a relatively small proportion of the greater Grand Canyon area. Only since 1975 has the park included the full 277-mile length of the Colorado River from Lees Ferry in the east to Grand Wash Cliffs near Lake Mead in the west, and even now for most of that distance it’s restricted to the narrow strip of the inner gorge. Ranchers whose animals graze in the federal forests to either side, mining companies eager to exploit the mineral wealth hidden in the ancient rocks, engineers seeking to divert the river to feed the deserts of southern Arizona, and Native Americans who have lived in the canyon since long before the first Europeans reached North America, have combined to minimize the size of the park.

The vast majority of visitors arrive at the South Rim – it’s much easier to get to, there are far more facilities (mainly at Grand Canyon Village, inside the park), and it’s open all year round. Another lodge and campground are located at the North Rim, which by virtue of its isolation can be a lot more atmospheric, but at a thousand feet higher this entire area is usually closed by snow from mid-October until mid-May. On both rims, the main activity for most visitors consists of gazing over the gorge from overlooks placed at strategic intervals along the canyon-edge roads. Both also serve as the starting points for countless hiking trails down into the canyon, and it’s even possible to hike all the way from one to the other, along the so-called Corridor Trails, which takes a minimum of two days from rim to rim.

Simply to drive from one rim to the other takes 215 miles, while to complete a loop around the entire national park would require you to drive almost eight hundred miles, and pass as far west as Las Vegas, Nevada. Even that long haul would miss out several of the most interesting detours in the greater Grand Canyon region, into the baffling checkerboard of federal, state, Indian and private lands that lies beyond the boundaries of the park. These include several national monuments, including two huge ones created in 2000, Vermilion Cliffs and Grand Canyon–Parashant; a couple of national recreation areas at either end, Glen Canyon and Lake Mead; two sections of the Kaibab National Forest, north and south of the river; and four neighboring Indian reservations, belonging to the Havasupai, the Hualapai, the Kaibab Paiute and the Navajo. While most (though not quite all) provide recreational possibilities for visitors, detailed throughout this book, few offer any kind of accommodation or other facilities. For that, you need to call in instead at the many gateway towns on all sides of the canyon, from Flagstaff and Williams in the south, to Kanab in the north.

Synopsis
"The Rough Guide to the Grand Canyon" covers the whole of this awe-inspiring region, which stretches over 250 miles along each side of the Colorado River. Its discriminating approach should help to ensure that the reader gets the most out of their trip. Day-hikes within the National Park are highlighted, as are attractions along the north and south rims of the canyon and beyond the park itself. Walking routes are supported by detailed full-colour maps, which are cross-referenced within the guide.

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