Monday - Grand Canyon and Kaibab National Forest

When we did our drive along Desert View Drive back on Friday, we had not stopped at *every* overlook... one of the ones that we skipped was Grandview Point, which happens to be the closest overlook of the canyon to where we are currently parked. So, Monday morning, we decided to drive over to Grandview Point to see the grand view!

There had been a hotel on Grandview Point in the past.

It was, indeed, a *grand* view!

Each day and time-of-day that we view the canyon, the colors and shadows are different, giving different perspective.

It is beautiful in each view!

We hiked a short distance down the Grandview trail -- I was going to take a picture of Carl at this point, but there was a nice young couple arriving on the trail and the lady offered to take a picture for us...

It is nice to have pictures of both of us with this beautiful creation in the background! Carl is using one of the photos that another couple took of us as the background display on his computer screen now!

So beautiful...

We got back to the rig at about 10am, and since Gracie was pretty much in full sun, we wanted to see how our solar panels were performing:

They were generating 600-700W of power...

 

And delivering 30A more to the batteries than we were currently using (charging the batteries).

After lunch, we decided to try taking a bike ride...

Since we had driven into this area on Friday, we knew that the road that passes in front of Gracie heads on further into the forest and that there are a number of other roads that we could take.

Grandview Lookout Tower

We really like where we are parked, but honestly, there are some very inconsiderate folks -- mainly folks with ATVs who go buzzing around both producing a lot of noise and dust, as well as passenger vehicles who think driving 35-40MPH is totally acceptable on these dusty gravel roads. As we were biking to Grandview, we came across some of them -- it isn't pleasant biking in someone's dust...

Some of the information on the board by Grandview Lookout Tower -- there were some trails that did not allow motorized vehicles -- sounds good to us!

A close up of the map

We had seen a marker for the Arizona Trail when we were in Tusayan -- 800 miles? Maybe not all of it, but we could ride on part of it today...

This part looked good...

Close up of the trail portion that we started on.

In the beginning, the trail was pretty wide and easy to ride on...

Carl can take pictures of me while we're moving, but I can only manage to take pictures of him when we stop -- this was when his son Steve called and we took a break for them to chat.

What is most surprising to me is how clear (uncluttered) the ground is within the forest. There is very little undergrowth. From what I have read, this is desirable for the forest to survive a forest fire...there was a signboard along the forest road (or is it "fire road"?) with information about some efforts that the Forest Service is making:

It makes the forest very open and almost like a city park.

You may be able to see that the trail at this point is significantly narrower... it also was very rocky as it went down and up through small ravines.

This was at a spot where it crossed one of the fire roads, and had information about how far we had to go to places along the trail... I don't think we'll make it to Mexico... not today anyway!

We did ride a ways further though -- probably about a mile and a half out and back on the Arizona Trail. I think the trail would be better suited to hiking or mountain bikes -- our bikes are better for hard surfaces than rocks that roll underneath the tires as we pedal.

The other side of the road as we were returning...

We could have taken the Arizona Trail back to Tusayan, or even to Utah, but decided to head back to the rig having done as much bike riding as we wanted to do on this day!

When we got back to where Gracie is parked, some of our neighbors were outside and had a fire in their firepit. We spoke to them and then got to talking -- they were from Providence, RI, and are out on a 6-9 month RV trip to the west. It was nice to hear what they have seen and where they are planning to go next, and to share with them some of the tools we use for trip planning and routing.