Route 66 To The Grand Canyon

With Spring just about to spring, we decided to try our luck with good weather at the south rim of the Grand Canyon. At 7400ft, we knew it was a gamble, but the Grand Canyon is worth gambling on. From Joshua Tree to the spot we had picked out for boondocking was 6 1/2 “Google Maps” hours which was more than we like. Wanting to break up the trip with a laundry and grocery stop, we stayed at Fort Beale RV Park in Kingman, AZ for a week.

The following Sunday, we packed up and continued on. From obsessively checking the weather, we were expecting 1-3 inches of snow on Tuesday, an amount we thought we could deal with. Our boondocking spot was on Kaibab National Forest land accessed inside the south entrance gate of Grand Canyon National Park and 12 miles east on Desert View Drive – i.e. very remote. Although it was already a bit muddy (we had to use traction boards when we got stuck while backing in), the spot was perfect, surrounded by Ponderosa pines yet still enough sun for our solar panels.

We were so excited to be living just a couple of miles away from this view at Grandview Point, the highest location on the south rim! I was dreaming of catching a sunrise and a sunset and having picnic dinners here.

Sadly, it was not meant to be. The forecast kept changing to colder temperatures (mid-teens at night) and more snow (1ft on Tues). We didn’t want to risk running out of propane (for our heat!) and getting stuck in our campsite which would inevitably get muddier with snowmelt. So after just one night, we moved an hour south, to the Grand Canyon Railway RV Park in Williams. This turned out to be a good decision because it proceeded to snow every other day, sometimes twice in one day that week. We spent a lot of time shoveling snow off our roof.

The town of Williams was built around the Grand Canyon Railway after prospectors realized that there was more money to be made with tourism than with mining ore in the canyon and convinced the Santa Fe Railroad to lay tracks to the canyon. You can still take the train from Williams to the Grand Canyon Village.

Route 66 also goes through Williams and there are a couple of blocks of kitschy stores downtown. One day we will drive the entire route from Chicago to LA at once. Williams was the last town in Arizona to get bypassed when I40 was completed.

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We did make a couple of trips up to visit the park. At every lookout, we had the same conversation. “This doesn’t even look real. How does this even exist? How did a river do this?”

The oldest rocks of the Grand Canyon are almost 2B years old. At different times the granite, shale, limestone, or sandstone layers were formed and laid horizontally, with the youngest rocks on the top. Forty rock layers have been identified.

Next, between 70 and 30M years ago, plate tectonics lifted the region, creating the high and flat Colorado Plateau, oddly without breaking up the rock layers. This uplift bears the main responsibility for the average ~1-mile depth of the Grand Canyon, rather than the river.

A relatively short 5M years ago the Colorado River and its tributaries began carving the canyon, a process called downcutting. Before the Glen Canyon Dam was built and the river controlled, there were dramatic changes in the amount of flow each year. When the Rocky Mountain snow would melt, the river rose and carried large amounts of sediment and boulders that acted like chisels carving out the canyon. This chiseling was amplified during periods of episodic flooding. The river will continue downcutting, although at a slower rate, until it eventually reaches sea level (another ~2000ft).

On Wednesday afternoon we walked on the Rim Trail from the main visitor center to the village and back. This is the busiest part of the park near parking, campgrounds, and hotels. Before heading back to Williams, we ate dinner at one of the lookouts on Desert View Drive.

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On Saturday, we went back and rode the shuttle to Hermits Rest, as far west as we could get at the south rim. We then hiked the 8 miles back to the village on the Rim Trail, finding a lot more solitude on this walk than earlier in the week. We saw just about as many mule deer as people.

The Grand Canyon can not be accurately depicted in photographs. Even though our boondocking spot and the weather did not mix, we are incredibly thankful we at least got to see it with our own eyes. Since we did not get to hike down into the canyon on this visit, the Grand Canyon has been put on our must return to list.

In an effort to warm up and also get closer to the Colorado River we moved on to Lee’s Ferry where the Grand Canyon begins!