Grand Canyon
Ever since I came
to Phoenix, Arizona, I was raring to visit Grand Canyon. There are 3 reasons
for my restlessness to visit this place, first it is a marvelous place for
photography, secondly it is one of the seven natural wonders of the world and
most importantly I am going to be in Phoenix only for 30 days and I get only 2
weekends to make it to the place.
I hate going
alone to the tourist places and unfortunately I did not have any one to
accompany. But luck struck last moment on Friday 27th April, when my another
colleagues bumped on to some other Indian friends from another company working
with Honeywell and they asked if he is interested to join them to visit Canyon on
weekend. So my lucky door to Canyon
opened.
We were gang
of 8 people and rented 2 self driven cars for driving down to Canyon on
Saturday 28th April at 9am. When we actually left from Phoenix on Saturday was 12.30pm
from Phoenix. 4 of us Hari, Subbu and Venkanna and I started in Toyota Camry
and Mr.Cool Subbu was our driver. Vikas, Aftab, Darshan and Albert drove in
Nissan Altima.
We started
with a GPS guiding us to Grand Canyon, initially Subbu wanted to take some road
which actually he did not know J and ignored the GPS repeatedly. After spending some time on
wrong ways and some rash turns and twists on the road, we decided to listen to
GPS and drive accordingly. Mr.Subbu was so impatient he took a U turn where it
is not allowed, (luckily there wasn’t any cops) and he made another Car driver to
honk on us. It was the first and last time I heard a vehicle horn sound. Yes
unlike India here honking is considered as very nasty and rude.
Finally we
were on the track to Canyon only to realize we were taking a different route and our counter parts in another Car were on
some other route. I don’t know if it was configuration of the GPS system, but
it made us to drive thru some very scenic places. Our route was perhaps longer
or slower than one other friend’s used, so naturally we had reached Canyon much
more time after other guys had arrived.
We did not
stop at many places on the way as we wanted to reach Canyon before sunset. We
only stopped for a photo off and for a light bite Burger and coke. For this
also we had to go to one outlet to other just to find some vegetarian food for
me.
Finally we
reached around 6.oopm and we were on dot or few seconds late for Sun set. Sun
was half down behind the Canyon and I could manage to capture few sun set shots
in my Canon 60D.
After catching
up with sunset and saying good bye to Sun who was running away to brighten up India,
we went for some quick shopping for the night and collected the Tents along
with fire wood for camping and headed to our designated place to put up tents.
Vikas Hegde and Darshan put up the tents within no time and we started the bone
fire which will be used as the grill for cooking some food too. We had very
clear sky and could see lot of stars and Moon in the sky.
Guys had
packed lot of Chicken/Fish etc and they were so considerate that they had
brought some Mushroom and other vegetarian items for me. I think Albert had
done a great job in getting all stuff. It was freezing cold as the time gone by
and by mid night it was too chilly. Guys had multiple rounds of chicken and
fish first after I had my mushrooms grilled. Some settled to sleep at about
2am. Subbu, Aftab and Vinnu decided to sleep inside the Car and Vikas, Albert,
Hari, Darshan I settled in one of the 2 tents we had. We decided to sleep in
one tent as we thought that would help create some warmness inside. But forget
about the warmness, out hands and legs were getting numb. So by around 4 we got
up one by one and stood around fire to warm ourselves and wake our numb organs
one by oneJ. It was really horrible night, despite that we really enjoyed
the moment with lot of fun and leg pulling of each other. Vikas was the comedy
master and Albert our Tripod photographer Albert was trying to capture a
picture out of ZERO visibility, I said ahh Albert you are Genius. Vikas said,
no Albert is a Ghost photographer J.
Then it was
time to go to see Sun rise, it was 4.00 am and we quickly got into Cars and
drove to hill top only to leave behind Hari who had gone to attend nature’s
call at wrong time.
We reached
within 15 minutes to view Sun rise and you could see whole Canyon area in a
pre-sunrise twilight of Blue color. It’s really amazing view. There was lot of
Tourists already gathered at the place to see the spectacular.
This is the
best time to view Grand canyon before sun rise and after sun rise about till
11am when sun is kind on us and as the sun rises the one by one peaks of canyon
gets illuminated by Sun rays. It is breathtaking
when you see it for the first time. Grand
Canyon is simply the most beautiful naturally created place. This is really one
of those places you must visit in your lifetime. The Grand Canyon is amazing, a
miracle formed by nature testimony to the billions of years history of our
mother earth.
Grand Canyon
is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River. The Grand Canyon is 446
km long, up to 29 km wide and attains a depth of over 6,000 feet. Nearly two billion years of the Earth's
geological history have been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries
cut their channels through layer after layer of rock while the Colorado Plateau
was uplifted.
Watch the Grand Canyon closely:
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