Sedona, AZ + Grand Canyon

Our first stop after Phoenix was Sedona, AZ. Sedona is a cute little town surrounded by these fantastic red rocks. The town itself is full of galleries, restaurants, and shops and looks like it would be a great place to live if you were an author or artist or something. However, rather than being lured into any of those great little shops (where I'm sure it'd be all too easy to drop an exorbitant amount of money on all sorts of things you don't really need), Scott and I decided to drive on through and spend our afternoon hiking.

As there are about 100 trails to choose from, we stopped by the visitors center to get some inside information on which were the best. The woman who helped us certainly seemed to know her stuff and she recommended a great trail that, in her words, "would give us a little taste of everything." I would say that she was absolutely right, as our two hour hike exposed us to everything from wide sweeping panoramas (like the one that I took above, about five minutes in to our hike) to shaded walks through the trees.

Scott and the dogs hiking | A sink hole on our path | Interesting tree bark we found | View taken about halfway through hike

I was fascinated by everything that I saw... the different types of cacti were probably my favorite plant from Arizona.

On our way to the Grand Canyon, we made a couple of different stops. One stop that we didn't plan, but was on our path and ended up being quite interesting, was Wupatki National Park. This park offered several Native American ruins, which were really quite unreal to walk through. It's hard to imagine that people actually lived in these buildings that literally sit in the middle of nothing.

Wupatki was a stop of convenience, as it lay directly on our route, but our next stop at Lake Powell was several hours out of our way. The drive, although I slept through about half of it, was really interesting. At one point we could see a tiny branch of the Grand Canyon that extended out into the middle of a completely flat plain. It looked like the ground had just split open without disturbing anything else around it. We originally planned to get to Lake Powell with enough time to look around the lake, do some hiking, and then set up camp before nightfall and stay there for the night. However, when we got there, it became abundantly clear that one cannot really see Lake Powell unless they are on the water. In order to drive from one point of the lake to another you have to backtrack a couple of hours and go completely away from the lake because there are no roads that follow the shoreline. Since we had the dogs with us, we couldn’t very well rent kayaks and paddle around for a bit so we just decided to walk along the part of the shore that we were at and then make an early departure for the Grand Canyon. Although we did not get to see as much of it as we had hoped, Lake Powell is really spectacularly beautiful and I hope that we have the chance to go back there sometime in the future.

Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam

After having to backtrack a little ways (to Scott’s dismay), we started on the trek towards Grand Canyon National Park. The drive is nice, but totally unassuming. Nothing about the landscape looked at all different than what we’d been staring at for the past three days. Until, that is, you get about fifteen miles outside of the park and you start seeing sporadic glimpses of small canyons running through the middle of cow fields. The entire region seems utterly unpopulated and you got the feeling that people owned so much land that they had likely never even seen everything in their estate.

Once we got into the park we went straight back to the camping area, hoping and praying that there would be one available. Luckily, we were not followed by our bad luck from Florida and we got a site without any problems. Since it was already pretty late by this time, we decided to just catch a glimpse of the Grand Canyon from an overlook at the front of the park and save all of our major exploring for the next day… it’s still pretty darn impressive, even if you only see it from one vantage point.

The next morning we got up and headed out for a hike around the canyon. Lucky for us, dogs are allowed on all of the trails as long as you stay above the rim. Although it would have been cool to get to hike down into the canyon, the view from up top is still truly amazing. There is a great shuttle system that follows the canyon rim, which allows visitors to either ride the entire way and hop out of the viewpoints of interest or hike out one way and catch the shuttle at the end to get back to where they started. However, dogs are not allowed on the shuttle so we had to suck it up and walk the whole way, which really wasn’t bad. The trail that we chose was 14 miles long, but we only walked the first two miles of it before turning around to head back. The views were just incredible! There aren’t really enough synonyms for “impressive” to really say what it was like to see the Grand Canyon, I’m just glad that we had the chance to do it.