Day 31 > 33 - Larger than Life

DATE: Tuesday MARCH 29TH

TIME: 11:34PM PST

LOCATION: las vegas nv

Ok so Im pretty pissed right now because I just wrote this entire thing out and my fucking browser decided to close itself. Not crash, just randomly giving me some kind of prompt to close the fucking thing mid typing. Didn’t even have a chance to read what it was prompting me for. Bullshit.

Anyway, lets try this again. This is a long one.

So when we left off, we were on our way to the Grand Canyon. We had a beautiful ride there and visited Glen Canyon along the way. We honestly kinda stumbled onto it since it was directly in our path. We took the scenic drive along Lake Powell, then headed over to Horseshoe Bend. The bend was our first brush with the type of landscape we would be seeing at the grand canyon. For those who haven’t seen the horseshoe, take a look at the pictures. It is truly remarkable. It was a longer walk than we expected. We foolishly didn’t bring water with us in the 90 degree Arizona heat, but we ended up only being dehydrated rather than severely dehydrated. So I call that a win.

We entered Grand Canyon National Park just before sunset and took a pit stop at the Desert View Point. A tall desert watch tower overlooking the canyon. With the sun setting over the canyon wall and the mist rising from the land below it was difficult to properly see the true scale of the canyon. But even still, it was magical. We sat at Desert View Point for around 40 minutes taking it all in, then made it to the hotel just as darkness fell.

Our full day at Grand Canyon was pretty full yet relaxing. We woke up a bit late and got lunch at one of the local places. I don’t remember the name of it, but the food kinda sucked anyway so probably for the best. After food we went to the visitor’s center and got our passports stamped. Unfortunately the actual visitor center was closed for renovations, but they were running passports in the gift shop. After getting stamps, we headed to the Trail of Time.

The Trail of Time is a pretty long trail that follows the southern canyon wall. We ended up barely walking any of it because as we arrived we were greeted by a beautiful vista. This was our first true look at the insanity of Grand Canyon. More so than any place we have been, this place defies explanation. Vast, colossal, these words barely describe this place. It was so huge and deep that it almost didn’t look real, as though I was staring at a painting. We walked the trail for a short time, then settled onto a cliff edge just off the beaten path, where Deniz drew the vista in his sketchbook. We sat there for around an hour just taking it all in. I would say take a look at the pictures, but honestly? They don’t do it justice. This is just one of those places you have to see in person.

After we got back to the car we headed back into town to take advantage of the local Imax theater which was showing a documentary on the Grand Canyon. The movie was cute, if not kind of silly most of the time. It was pretty clear that all of the voice acting was done after the fact. But it painted a beautiful picture of the history of the canyon, and gave some beautiful shots of the river below.

Once the movie concluded we decided we wanted to see the sunset on the canyon again. We first checked out one view point which came recommended in our national park guide, but we weren’t satisfied with the view. So we decided to try to book it back to Desert View Point. We got most of the way there (40 min drive) but ended up pulling off onto a small offshoot road just as the sun began to set. We got some amazing photos and time-lapse footage of the sun retreating behind the cliffs. Ill post all of it below.

Now… I know what you are thinking, “Harrison, your thing at the top says you are in Las Vegas? Where is all of the Las Vegas content?”

Well, it just didn’t feel right to lump both Vegas and the Grand Canyon into one post. I wanted to make sure I did both justice, so I am going to split them up. At the time of writing, we are leaving tomorrow to travel to Death Valley National Park, so I will write up Vegas tomorrow evening and include Death Valley along with it. Thank you all for bearing with me, the longer I am away from home the more tired I feel in the evenings. I don’t think I am sleeping too well without my cat. But hey, it is what it is. We are nearing the halfway point of the trip, It is currently day 35 at the time of writing and the halfway point is Day 37. The trip is managing to both be incredibly long and go by super fast. Very much the Fast/Long and Long/Fast time perception pairs. Ill link a cool video on time perception if you are interested in reading up on what Im talking about.

Anywho, thats all for now, stay safe out there

Signing off

-H

I didn’t forget to post the video, you did!