The Canyon of all Canyons
This morning we got up at around 8am, leisurely making our way to the Grand Canyon national park. It’s about 80mi from Flagstaff, and we got there at around 10:30am. Our first stop was at the local airport, to book ourselves a helicopter flight over the canyons. There were two types, the “short” (25-30min) which went from the south rim to the north rim and back, and the “long” which circled around and tracked both rims for a few miles before changing course (45-50min). The longer one obviously was a bit more expensive, but we both nodded when the question came up: the long one! We’re only here once and we may as well do it right.
The next scheduled flight in a helicopter that sits 7 people was at 12:30pm. So we went off to Tusayan, the neighboring town, to find some brunch, as we had about 90min to kill before we had to check in for our flight. We had a great salad (Pim) and BLT (Paul) at a local cafe and walked back to the car, drove to the airport at 11:45 and hung out there for a bit. At 12:15 our pilot stepped into the room, actually there were five pilots and quite a few folks to take a tour. Our flight had 6 people in it. I took the window seat (better filming position), and Paul graciously took the middle seat (which ended up having spectacular frontal and both sides’ view for photos.
The flight was spectacularly awesome. At times, the chopper would yaw and pitch and drop a few feet, but when this happened I was looking at the pilot who was just glancing around the environment and generally enjoying himself, so I figured this is all a part of helicopter flight. I shot a lot of footage (I’ll compose a youtube video when I get back home in Zurich, as I do not have iMovie or other editing software on my mac right now). Amongst ourselves we also took about 100 photos - some of them are very very good!! See the picture gallery for details.
The flight took 53 minutes and 12 seconds (I timed it on my chronograph) and we made our approach, circled around once to let some other traffic pass, and then made our final cleanly and landed very softly indeed. We thanked Joel, our pilot, who immediately picked up a new bunch of folks at 13:45 for the next flight. I ordered the DVD of the in-flight camera system, which made shots of both us in the helicopter, as a frontal view of what we were flying over. The footage is quite good, albeit a bit low resolution. I already have an idea on how I will use it in my to-be-made video of the canyon.
Then Paul and I hiked to Yavapai lookout (about 2 mi) from the visitor center, but it was kind of busy with a lot of busloads of people (French, Korean, Japanese, …) babbling and being overly ‘present’. So we hopped in the car and drove to Desert View, which is about 25 miles east of the main visitor center. Along the way we stopped at lookout points, which were generally a lot more peaceful, it being early spring and all. When we got to the lookout at Desert View, we filled the car up with gas (very expensive), and drove east bound back to the 98 south to Flagstaff.
When we got to Flagstaff, we hunted for a bit of food. After trying three different steak houses (one of which looked very promising but they were asking us to wait for 75min and we were famished), we settled for an ordinary diner for burgers and fries. They were delicious!! and the fry-cook came out after we were done to have a chat. We told him about or roadtrip and gave him the URL to our blog - he said he had always wanted to do a roadtrip with his son - and I think he should! it’s great fun.
Anyway, the guy urged us to go see San Diego as well while we’re in the LA area. He gave us some good POIs to ponder, and we’ve already made plans on going from Las Vegas to San Diego, and then up to Los Angeles. It’ll be great :)
Posted by Pim van Pelt at 11:25 PM