Our cabin was directly above the door at the bottom.
On August 26th, we climbed onboard the Lake Shore Limited for the start of our honeymoon. In Chicago, we exchanged trains and got on the Southwest Chief.
I would highly recommend that everyone travel by train at least once in their life. The Southwest Chief is a "Superliner" style train. We stayed in a Superliner II deluxe cabin. The nicest one aboard.
Our cabin was directly above the door at the bottom.
Superliners are double-deck trains. You move between cars on the upper level. The lower level is reserved mostly for storage, handicapped rooms or seating, or in the case of a sleeper, the larger family room. There are also several bathrooms downstairs.
We took the train to Flagstaff, Arizona. Due to a little "speeding incident" on the part of our train's engineer, we arrived 5 hours later. This delay was due to the fact that the conductor (who is in charge of the train's safety) decided that he wanted to have a new crew take over. While this delayed us, I think from a safety point of view it was a good idea. Fortunately we could call ahead and get our car reserved.
We arrived in Flagstaff around 3:00 AM. There's not much happening that time of night. But we drove up to the Grand Canyon and arrived a few minutes before dawn. This was a beautiful time and we managed to watch the sun rise in the east with about two dozen other people who had arrived to watch the dawn. It is a spectactular sight! If you're at the Canyon for any length of time, get up one morning early enough to watch the sun rise. (I'll be adding a picture of it at some point I think.)
One comment on pictures at the Grand Canyon. Few do it justice. Most are too washed our or blah compared to the real thing.
But, having watched it, we had to get some water and get ready for our hike in. We hiked down the South Kaibab Trail This is a river to rim trail on the South Rim that has NO WATER the entire way down. Make sure you heed ALL their warnings regarding water. We took longer than we expected and sure enough ran out. While at the time it seemed like a miserable experience it was in reality not as bad as we though. However, we got off lucky. People die every year in the Canyon due to dehydrayion. Unfortunately for us, since we were married in August, we chose the hottest time of the year to hike. Again, if you want to hike, do it in April or May. It's a lot cooler usually and less crowded. Or hike in January. Definitely colder and a lot smaller crowds. But you do have to expect snow on the rim and parts of the Canyon.
After a brutal day, we arrived at the campground at the bottom and set up camp. We were quickly asleep. The next morning we got an earlier start and it was a shorter hike. We started by 6:40 AM and finished by noon. Still a hot day and parts of it were in the sun. But it is a great hike since you hike along the river part of the way and latter ascend, "The Devil's Corkscrew" (Picture coming).
For our second night we camped at Indian Gardens. This is located at the remains of an old Havasupai Indian site. There is lots of water here and shade. We spent most of the daylight hours sitting around, doing nothing, and stay cool and wet. We had become desert animals.
We were awakened several times during the night by deer grazing next to and even in our campsite. Since I was sleeping outside on top of the picnic table (don't laugh it's cooler!) I was a little worried I'd wake up to a deer licking the salt off the bottom of my feet. That didn't happen, but finally we decided we had had enough and it was time to start hiking. We started up the trail at 4:00 AM.
Though nighttime, the almost full moon and our headlamps gave us a lot of light. It was also very cool. We made good time in spite of the darkness. We reached the 3 mile hut around 6:00 AM and reached the 1.5 mile hut around 7:30. It was just past here that we encountered our first direct sun. In the meantime it was a gorgous site to watch the sun rise while we were INSIDE the Canyon. Around 8:00 AM we started to encounter day hikers, mule trains and the like. We discovered that day-hikers have this fascination with overnighters and are amazed that anyone would actually do what we did. We got cornered at one point by an Italian couple. The woman was amazed that the trail behind us went as far as a 1/4 mile more. When we told her it went about 4.25 miles more I thought she would faint in terror or amazement.
The first thing we did on the rim was to buy some Ice Cream. At 9:00 AM this may sound early for ice cream, but believe me, it was worth it.
Last Update: August 25, 1999