Laundry and Our First Glimpse of the Grand Canyon

Another breakfast with the Germans, and we packed into the car and checked out of the hotel. We now should have been on our way to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to meet our friend Ryan and his girlfriend Talia, who would be joining us in the adventures for this coming week. However, the laundromat called.

Saturday morning must be the prime time to do laundry because the laundromat was extremely crowded. Nick and I got a taste of being the minority. Everyone was Indian. Little kids were eyeing us with curiosity. People were mostly not speaking English, still increasing our sense of being in a foreign country.

Drying our clothes turned out to be trickier then we had foreseen. More then half of the dryers were out of order. Many people like us were looking for an empty dryer, yet there was no clear queue that we could detect. After running back and forth between lanes of machines, navigating between carts of clean, and dirty, and dry and wet laundry, and carefully avoiding little kids climbing the tables, we finally got a dryer. Nick struck a conversation with the only other white couple at the laundromat, and got to use their dryer as a consequence. They were an elderly couple from California who spent the previous two nights camping by a Navajo National Monument, Betatakin, which they could not stop raving about.

We finally started out on our way to the Grand Canyon around 11 am, with many pieces of not so dry laundry spread out over the back seat of the car. The drive was pretty. We descended down into a valley and went past the Vermilion Cliffs. We stopped for lunch in Page, AZ near Lake Powell, and stopped at the super secure Glen Canyon Damn over Colorado River. The road to the Grand Canyon National Park on the North Rim winds through the Kaibab National Forest. Its vast green meadows reminded us very much of Yellowstone National Park, except that the meadows there were yellow probably because we were there in September.

We checked into our camping site and found a deserted silver Honda Civic with “1 TALIA” license plate parked right next to it. Ryan and Talia were already here—now we just had to find them. Nick assumed that they must have started hiking down the nearby trail that led to the Grand Canyon Lodge and ended at the Bright Angel’s Point. We frantically ran down the trail for about 3 minutes when Nick abruptly stopped running. He decided, rightly so, that there is no point in catching up with them even if we could, and so we drove to the lodge instead.

The Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim was first built in 1928, but burned down completely in 1932. The “new” Grand Canyon Lodge was built in 1937 on the footprint of the 1928 lodge thus using the same floor plan. Gilbert Stanley Underwood designed this rustic lodge such that visitors would not see the canyon when they first arrived and walked through the front entrance. Guests must make their way across the grand foyer, and descend a few steps into the “sun room.” It is here that they get their first glimpse of the Grand Canyon.

Our mouths ajar, we walked through the “sun room” and on to the terrace. By now we have seen many colorful rocks and formations, but the sheer magnitude of the Grand Canyon was unbelievable. Layers upon layers of purple, red, and grey rocks laid exposed while the unseen river flowed somewhere far below.

Nick and I walked out to the Bright Angel’s Point. As we walked back along the canyon rim towards the lodge, we saw Ryan and Talia, who were about to take the trail back to the camping site. Instead we drove back together, eager to start our primitive living mode.

Talia and I set up the tents while the men went off to obtain a bottle of wine and firewood. Soon we had a nice fire going, and food was plentiful. By the time it was dark, we have feasted on hotdogs, cous-cous and some Trader Joe’s eggplant sauce and lentils.

When Nick and I camped together a few times before, I always found myself feeling a bit on edge after dark, afraid of everything I could not see, which would be … everything. However, tonight I felt no fear at all, which I attributed to the “power in numbers.”