[Late entry today; internet was down at my house.]
After I left Desert View in the Grand Canyon, I headed north and
visited two more units of the National Park System.
Again, neither cared that I was barefooted.
The first place I visited was the Navajo Bridge overlooked by the Vermilion Cliffs. This is the route (US89A) that one takes to get to the north rim of the Grand Canyon (and it is a long one—if you think about it, one simply cannot build a bridge over most locations along the river).
Here’s a (stitched) panoramic shot of the Vermilion Cliffs.
Vermilion Cliffs (click for the really large version)
Next, here I am at the Navajo Bridge, built in 1927-1928.
At the Navajo Bridge
You can kind of see the replacement bridge behind me. The original bridge has now been converted into a walkway from which you can get a great view of the Colorado River. You can see that the Grand Canyon is just getting started—at this point it is only a Fine Canyon. One end of the bridge is the National Park Visitor Center; the other end is on the Navajo Reservation.
Colorado River
Those dots in the water are rafts.
Again, no problem going into the visitor’s center barefoot.
Nest stop was the Glen Canyon Dam.
Glen Canyon Dam
Again, no problem with bare feet in the Visitor’s Center. They did have tours of the turbines, but I’m afraid that at that point it was getting later in the day and I didn’t have time to take one. It would have been interesting to see if they would have let me take a tour barefoot.
After that I headed for Bryce Canyon, without any specific plans. Along the road to the canyon, though, I passed through Red Canyon, which had a National Forest Campground, and I got the last spot. Here’s a sunset from my campsite.
Sunset Over Red Canyon
You can see that this is a much wetter environment. There are actually trees again, though the spot I put my tent (the only flat spot at that particular campsite) was more amongst scrub.
Red Canyon Campsite
The other indication of a wetter environment was something that every east coast tenter is aware of. For the first time on my trip when I decamped, the underside of my tent was damp. That’s the usual situation in the East. But it highlights the dryness of every other place I camped, from Mesa Verde to Chaco Canyon to the Grand Canyon that the bottom of my tent was not the least bit damp in any of those places (with the exception of Indian Garden, where I camped right next to a spring).
