It was hot in Phoenix today – very hot. In anticipation of the oven like temperatures, Chris Walsh (a fellow Honeywell engineer from Sydney) and I decided to visit the Grand Canyon. At an altitude of over 7,000 feet above sea level, I expected the south rim of the Grand Canyon would be cooler than the valley floor of Phoenix and besides, Chris had never visited there before.
We left Phoenix just after 7 am and traveled north on I17 heading towards Flagstaff. Phoenix is just over 1,000 feet above sea level and the road north rises inexorably, climbing to over 8,000 feet along the way. We took a detour via Sedona, surrounded by its ring of red sandstone formations. The red rocks form a popular backdrop for many outdoor activities such as hiking and mountain biking trails and Sedona is a magnet for spiritual souls and artists alike.
We stopped to visit the Chapel of the Holy Cross, a Catholic chapel built into the red sandstone buttes overlooking Cathedral Rock with a large crucifix forming the central feature of the chapel. On previous visits to Sedona, I’ve enjoyed quiet time in the chapel, looking out to the horizon through the glass wall behind the altar, wondering about the meaning of life and my unlikely existence in the cosmos.
Sedona is about 4,000 feet above sea level and the road to Flagstaff continues to rise, winding up through Oak Creek Canyon; a pretty, tree lined route with numerous camping and day picnic sites.
Stopping for coffee in Flagstaff, we continued onto the Grand Canyon arriving around 1230. Despite hazy conditions due to nearby bush fires, the view from the south rim of the Grand Canyon remains spectacular – and my compact camera cannot do justice to the grandeur and scale of this immense chasm.
According to the short informational film we watched at the visitor centre, it has taken more the 5 million years for the Colorado River to carve out the canyon – at the rate of the thickness of a sheet of paper each year! Our three score and ten years on this earth are an insignificant tick on the earth’s geological clock.
On my first visit to the Grand Canyon in 1997, I was able to spend about half a day trekking some distance down the most popular hiking trail that leads into the canyon from the south rim. This is the Bright Angel Trail and it descends 4,380 feet to the Colorado River at an average grade of 10% along its entire length. I recall going down the trail for two hours and then it taking about five hours to return. Somewhere, there is a photograph of me crawling on all fours up the last few feet of the trail. Fortunately, Facebook would not be invented for another nine years so this image remains lost to history.
The fine white line meandering up the middle of the next image is the Bright Angel Trail traversing the intermediate plateau before again plunging to the valley floor where the Colorado River is flowing right to left heading towards Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam.
The temperature was about 35 degrees C at the Grand Canyon and I watched the outside temperature gauge climb gradually as we traveled back down to Phoenix arriving just after 8 pm. The temperature when we parked the car at Chris’ hotel was 45 degrees C. I told you it was hot in Phoenix today!
I arrived in Phoenix last Monday and still haven’t acclimatised to the time change. I continue to wake around 2 am and struggle to get more than about four hours sleep a night. The continual change in temperature has reactivated my cough that I thought I’d seen the back of on our recent trip to Scotland, England and Ireland.
Chris Walsh will be relocating to Baltimore on Monday for some customer meetings and I will remain in Phoenix for another week preparing for the upcoming Honeywell User’s Group before relocating to Houston next Sunday to begin the next phase of this project.