Camping at the national park here; nice place. The canyon is impressive; sheer black walls rising more than 2000 feet from the river. We drove the rim road and visited all the overviews of the canyon, some of which involve a mile round trip hike. The views are uniformly impressive. Some of them are such a steep drop that you cannot see the river below. Others, the canyon twists so much that you just get a glimpse of the river. We took a beautiful hike at the end of the rim road, the Mark Warner hike, no not VA's former governor but the guy who was most responsible for getting the canyon set aside as a national monument, before Clinton made it a NP in 2000 something. Gave us a great view of a long stretch of river moving through sheer canyon walls. We also went to an astronomy program at the park. The ranger gave perhaps the best talk I ever heard in the parks. Learned a lot, and they had four telescopes set up and two set of powerful binoculars. We saw Saturn, the moon as I never saw it befor, with incredible craters, sister stars, and a dieing (sp?) star that looked like George HW Bush's thousand points of light. It was impressive. We also drove to East Portal, and 16 degree road down into the canyon where the diversion tunnel of the Gunnison is located. The day we left we took the boat tour of the upper canyon, which is quite nice but not nearly as high as the largely inaccessible lower canyon.
No comments:
Post a Comment