Helen FieldsScience Writer

Hey, so all those people weren’t lying: The Grand Canyon is spectacular. We only had time for a day trip between the concerts in Phoenix and Las Vegas, but I’m told we picked the prettiest trail to go down. It’s the South Kaibab Trail. It goes down into the canyon along a little ridge, so you get 360-degree views. Wow. It was pretty. And since it’s a canyon, the trail goes down fast. It starts out like this:

and goes on like this:

We stopped for lunch at the little bump just left of the middle of that picture, which also turned out to be a prime spot for knitting.

Yes, I (1) carried a partly-finished sweater 1.5 miles into the Grand Canyon and (2) was still wearing the wristband from the concert two days earlier. The sweater pattern is here, if you want to recreate the experience.

You have to be really careful hiking in the canyon, since this is the opposite of your normal hike – rather than going up (a mountain, say) in the morning and down in the afternoon, we went down and then had to get back up. But we adopted the motto “If you can perceive movement, you’re doing it wrong” and walked really, really, really slowly on the way out. We felt great, and the hike back up only took about 20 more minutes than the hike down. It made me think I could actually handle doing the whole canyon someday. I mean, some *two* days. I’m not crazy. The park is full of signs telling you not to do it in one day, many using this example.

We often wished we had a geologist along. For example, what the heck is going on here? This is in limestone at the top of the canyon (in that first set of switchbacks dropping down into the canyon).