Grand Canyon Photos

That's my niece, Emily, on her first hike in the Grand Canyon. We ran into this friendly desert bighorn sheep on the way down to Indian Gardens. I've seen a bighorn along the Bright Angel Trail several times, each time somewhere in the vicinity of the One-and-a-Half-Mile Rest House and the two-mile point, but whether it's the same one or not, I have no idea.

Desert bighorn sheep are often hard to spot in Grand Canyon, even in the open because they blend in quite well. They can scramble up a cliff face at 15mph, disappearing into terrain inaccessible to humans, so it's always a treat to catch sight of these beauties. The one pictured here is obviously quite accustomed to people. He stayed very close to trail for at least twenty minutes.

Read more about Desert Bighorn in Grand Canyon.

I love how such sharp, unforgiving plants produce beautiful, delicate flowers and the contrast between the blooms and the spines. I think that contrast makes for interesting photos.

This image is available as a mouse pad or a card on Zazzle.

Desert Blooms by Ramkitten
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A "Century Plant" is actually an agave. An Agave americana to be specific. The myth about the bloom is that it happens only once every 100 years, hence the popular but misleading name.

In reality, this agave lives between ten and thirty years, sending up a flower stalk as much as 26 feet high just once at the end of its life. The plant then dies but produces shoots from its base, which continue to grow.

This type of agave was important to the Native Americans who once made the Grand Canyon their home, providing a source of soap, food, fiber, medicine and even weapons.

Century plants bloom in late spring and early summer. I took this photo in May on a hike down the Bright Angel Trail to Indian Gardens.

I don't know what most of the desert wildflowers are called that I see in Grand Canyon, but I enjoy them nonetheless.

Such beautiful things live in a such a harsh environment, with very little water and extremely hot temperatures during the summer months. I've been in the canyon when the thermometer at Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Canyon read 130 degrees Fahrenheit!

The pictographs in this photo are located along the upper portion of the Bright Angel Trail, between the South Rim and Indian Gardens. If you know just when to look up from the trail, they're not difficult to spot, but most hikers don't realize they're there and pass right by.

So, what's the difference between pictographs and petroglyphs, then?

Pictographs are painted onto stone with some sort of mineral or plant substance and combined with a binder like fat or blood.

Petroglyphs, on the other hand, are carved, abraded or chipped into stone, and the outer surface of the stone is removed to expose the usually lighter color underneath.

Pictographs are much more fragile than petroglyphs, so they're usually found in protected places like beneath rock overhangs or caves.

You can read more about rock art and the various types on Petroglyphs.us.

This photograph was taken at about 7:30am on October 1st, at Cedar Ridge along the South Kaibab Trail. The colors in the Canyon were so vibrant at the time, and the chill of the morning was quickly wearing off.

My friends and I were hiking rim to rim that day, so we saw the canyon from before dawn till after dark. Our shadows became shorter and the temperature warmer as the day and those 21 miles went on.

The South Kaibab Trail is one of the main "corridor" trails from the South Rim to the Colorado River. It's just over 7 miles long and is a ridge trail, so there's little shade along the way and no water. But it's a spectacular and very popular trail.

This photo was taken on a rim-to-rim hike last October.

Well, personally I prefer to walk.

But mules are a fixture in Grand Canyon and have been since the 1800s, when they were first used to aid in mining and later, in the 1880s, used commercially to transport tourists. They've carried millions of visitors from the Rim to the Colorado River and points in between. Mules have also carried supplies to hikers and work crews, including members of the Civilian Conservation Corps that did so much work on trails, rest houses, bridges, and other buildings and fixtures in Grand Canyon back in the days following the Great Depression.

Today, you see mule trains along the South Rim, on the Bright Angel Trail, and the South and North Kaibab Trails.

Read more about the history of mules in Grand Canyon.

There are two bridges that take hikers and mules across the Colorado River at the bottom of Grand Canyon. One is the silver suspension bridge at the bottom of the Bright Angel Trail. The other is the older, black suspension bridge about half a mile away at the bottom of the South Kaibab Trail. The two bridges are connected on the south side of the river by the River Trail.

The black bridge was completed in 1928. Before this bridge was built, the only way for mules and people to get across the river was to ride in a large metal cage on a cable, constructed by David Rust. The cage was just large enough for one mule or several people at a time. That mule or those people would have to climb into this open bar cage and move across the river while the cables were swinging.

Read more about the history and construction of the black suspension bridge.

From Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim, looking about ten miles as the crow flies across to its counterpart on the north side, you can see the massive Bright Angel Fault. It's along the bottom of this fault, accompanied by Bright Angel Creek, that hikers can cover the 24 trail miles from the top of the Bright Angel Trail to the top of the North Kaibab Trail. (If you take the South Kaibab Trail to the river instead of the Bright Angel Trail, a rim to rim hike is 21 miles.)

Bright Angel Fault is still active, producing small earthquakes you can sometimes feel if you're in the Canyon.

Each year around the end of September or beginning of October, our outdoors club does a rim-to-rim Grand Canyon hike. This past year, as I was leaving the North Rim, heading back to Flagstaff after completing my own rim-to-rim trek, I took this photo of stunning Fall colors on the Kaibab Plateau.

The yellow, orange and light green trees are aspen. The darker trees in the back are evergreen Ponderosa pine.

The South Bass Trail is one of Grand Canyon's more remote rim to river hikes, requiring a long drive on dirt roads, part of which cross Hualapai Indian Reservation land, to reach the trailhead.

The South Bass Trail leads hikers 7.8 waterless miles and more than 4,400 vertical feet from the South Rim to the Colorado River, where you can camp on the beach near the Ross Wheeler boat, abandoned where it lies in 1915.

I hiked this trail over three days time (one down and two back up, with a night on the beach and a night on the Esplanade) with my Ranger friend, who took me to see some archeological sites along the way.

You can read more about backpacking off Grand Canyon's Beaten Path and see photos from the trip in my South Bass Trail trip report.