Days 8-9: Grand Canyon - The Grand Canyon National Park takes in 277 miles of the Colorado River, which has carved a humungous chasm into the Colorado Plateau. The South & North Rims average a distance of 10 miles apart as the crow flies but are separated by 217 miles of road! The South Rim (where we were staying) is about 7000ft above sea level! There is apparently an 11-16'c difference in temperature between the "cool" forested rim and the inner canyon which can reach temps of over 43'c! My first encounter was via an awesome helicopter flight over the widest and deepest part of the canyon. To say my jaw hit the floor is an understatement. To say its a very big hole is a super-understatement! It was truly amazing and I can understand why they had to call it "Grand". No amount of research could possibly prepare you for the sight. The flight was superb but all too quickly over, so to finish the day we headed off to a viewing point to watch the sunset - all we were missing was the champers! ;-)

Day 9: Hiking. It is recommended that noone attempts to hike from the rim to the river & back in one day (which is all we had) and not to hike between 10am-4pm. On that note of advice a group of us got up at the ungodly hour of 4am to watch the sunrise before taking the steep South Kaibab Trail 3 miles to Cedar Ridge lookout. This is the trail that continues deep into the canyon. I am glad we only chose to go that far as even at 7.30 in the morning it was already 30'c at the lookout and although the rim is supposed to be cooler by the time we had returned to the top at 10am it was 32'c. In the evening I went onto the Condor Ranger Talk which was very interesting but that was about the end of it for me that day. I fell asleep shortly after, waking long enough to feed, before drifting off to sleep land again - I was knackered!

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