A South Rim resident finally takes the trip to the desolate North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
As the raven flies, it’s only about 11 miles across from the South Rim (check it out here) of the Grand Canyon to the North Rim. However, it can take about 4.5 hours to drive. As a South Rim resident, who often drives 5 hours for a long weekend trip, you would think I would have gone to the other side of my home by now. Nope. It’s a little more complicated than that. Lodging is scarce and expensive. I don’t own much camping gear so I would have had to convince someone to go with me. The campground fills up constantly, so out to the forest for us (which is super scenic, by the way). But this summer, I scored a free place to stay whenever I want (that doesn’t involve sleeping in the wilderness), so I finally made the drive to the North Rim.
To be honest, it was fun being a tourist again at the Grand Canyon. I’ve been here over a year and a half, so not much is new anymore, but on the North Rim, all the views are different and so are the trails.
When you first enter the park, you may come across one of the more famous of the invasive species here. Elk are famous on the South Rim, but on the North, there are the Bison. Yes, both are invasive and are not native to the area.
There are a ton of bison on the North Rim. There are not native. They were brought to northern Arizona by a rancher that wanted to make a cross between cattle and bison and the bison eventually made their way into the northern part of the park.
I will admit. Baby bison are adorable.
Heading straight south of the entrance gate is the visitor center and the Grand Canyon Lodge. Head even further than that and you will find the Bright Angel Point (Bright Angel is a term used way too much in the park. There is Bright Angel Point on the North Rim, Bright Angel Trail and Bright Angel Lodge on the South Rim.)
Bright Angel Point is kind of snuggled in between two plateaus, so you can barely make out the main portion of the canyon in the distance.
The highest point in the park is Point Imperial at 8803 ft (2683 ft). Just look at that view.
Just amazing. The pinnacle is Mt. Hayden.
Just a bit to the right. You can make out where the Colorado River is.
The scenic drive continues onto the Walhalla Plateau. At the very end you get wonderful views at Angels Window and Cape Royal.
The aptly named Angels Window.
A bend in the Colorado River as seen from the top of Angels Window.
For some reason, I was obsessed with this “temple” or mesa, and I don’t even remember its name now.
I do remember the name of this one, Wotan’s Throne, as seen from Cape Royal.
I love the lighting of the canyon in this photo.
Near Cape Royal is a nice little trail, the Cliff Springs Trail, which follows a side canyon that means lots of shade. It starts in the forest and then follows the cliff face to a seep spring.
Near the start of the trail, are the remains of an ancestral Puebloan granary. Pretty cool and unexpected.
The trail follows the cliff edge.
And eventually reaches this mossy seep spring. It was nice and cool here.
These were areas that most people visit. Normally, this would include me too, but luckily, I have crazy friends with higher clearance vehicles than I do so we went and did some exploring as well. This included the Kaibab National Forest. I’m not going to share the details of that because I don’t want people to find out where we went. Somethings need to stay hidden.
However, we did go take some of the dirt roads of the Kaibab National Forest to get to some viewpoints inside of the park (the national forest roads were in much better shape). We only made it to two.
To get to Swamp Point (weird name for a point, to be honest), we had to take some really bumpy and questionable roads.
Bumping along at 5 mph. There is a whole series of these photos. My friend told me I should make a collage of them. Did I also mention it was raining?
Looking towards the main canyon, along a side canyon while raining.
The monsoon clouds did break after we had been at Swamp Point for 10 minutes, leaving us with great views. This is looking the other way from the last view.
We headed back along that questionable road, along a not as questionable road to Sublime Point. This is where I was missing my normal camera, which came to an unfortunate demise earlier in the day. All the photos after Imperial Point have been taken with my iPhone.
This photo does not do Sublime Point justice.
We headed back to the more “developed” portion of the North Rim after that using an extremely questionable road. Never again.
It was fantastic being able to explore again at the Grand Canyon. I see the South Rim so much. I usually only go out to the rim when the weather changes (snow, rain and spotty clouds make fantastic photos), so it was great to see it from a new angle again.
Check out my next update where I return to Glen Canyon!
