Jenny Southan swaps the bright lights of Las Vegas for the awe-inspiring Grand Canyon
After a couple of days spent tramping across casino floors past groups of students with flagons of margarita hanging around their necks, I was dying to get out of Las Vegas and into the desert. Just sage brush and the beating sun for company. The devil in me would have liked to do it Hunter S Thompson-style in a fire-red Chevy convertible, but in the end it was a white Honda Civic from Budget Rent-a-Car that took me deep into the wilderness. And while Hunter had been in search of that elusive American Dream, my mission was to make it to the Grand Canyon and back in a day.
At 9am I hit the road, and within half an hour the sprawling urban mess had dissipated into a barren plateau. Highway 93 cuts a line straight over the Hoover Dam and into Arizona, and a well-placed car park right on the border meant I could stop and get out. I walked back partway over the vast concrete edifice and struggled to overcome my vertigo as I looked down, the sheer wall stretching far below.
There aren’t many turnings out here, and the monotony of the landscape was broken only by an occasional trailer park, gas station or wooden chapel. Licence plate spotting, I found, was a good way to pass the time, as in the US you can learn a little about the state the car is from by its slogan – for example, “The Silver State” is Nevada and “The Grand Canyon State” is Arizona. But the one that made me smile was Idaho’s “Famous Potatoes”.
By lunchtime, I saw burnt orange cliffs rising out of the land in the near distance, and the once small and disparate Joshua trees became vicious-looking spiky forests. Finally, a turning down a 20km pot-holed dirt track took me off the smooth, grey asphalt and into the depths of the Grand Canyon National Park.
The land around here, known as Grand Canyon West, is owned by Hualapai Native Americans, and access to the viewing areas by the rim costs US$41 per person. This includes a shuttle bus to Eagle Point and the Skywalk, opened by the tribe in 2007, as well as Guano Point, which offers stunning views, and Hualapai Ranch, home to cowboy shows and horseback riding. I bought a ticket in the gift shop and resisted the urge to get a souvenir T-shirt – one had a photo of some Native Americans armed with rifles, with the slogan: “Fighting terrorism since 1492.”
No amount of imagination can compare with experiencing the Grand Canyon first hand. It’s hard to grasp the scale of it, even when you are standing on the edge – step back and wait for a helicopter to pass through, and you will see it as barely a speck against the opposite side of the crevasse. In sunlight, the purple, salmon, gold and ochre colours in the layers of ancient rock appear more vivid than in any Technicolor movie.
The 446km gorge was carved out by the Colorado River over 17 million years – hard to believe when it looks a mere winding trickle at the bottom. At its widest points, the chasm is 29km across, and in places, if you throw a stone off the edge it would take about 18 seconds to hit the ground.
For me, the best way to take it all in was with my feet firmly on the ground, at least five metres away from the edge. But for the brave, there is the Skywalk, a semicircular glass platform jutting out into the abyss, 1,100 metres above the ground – higher than the tallest building in the world. If you can stomach it, it costs a further US$30.
With the dying sun leaving a crimson stain across the sky, I got back into the White Shark and hit the road. An hour or two in, driving through the darkness, Hunter’s words echoed through my mind: “On a trip like this, one must be careful of gas consumption. Avoid those quick bursts of acceleration that drag the blood to the back of the brain.” And, like that, a flash of fork lightning lit up the sky, the heavens rumbled, and heavy splotches of rain soaked the desert earth.
- Visit grandcanyonskywalk.com, budget.co.uk
