We got up before dawn this morning and headed over to Bright Angel path for sunrise photographs.  We walked partway down the hiking path for a better perspective, with the results still less than stellar.

After sunrise, we headed over to the mule enclosure.  I was thinking of maybe doing a series of close-ups of parts of the mules in a montage, but we were almost immediately chased away by the mule keepers… 🙁

On our way out of the Grand  Canyon, we stopped at several lookouts for last views of the canyon.  The ruins have nothing left but a single row of rocks showing where the Indian rooms once stood, and even those rocks were placed there by recent archeologists. Nothing of the original buildings really remain.  The last stop was at Desert View, with the iconic reconstructed tower.

From there it was a straight shot into Canyon de Chelly, a lesser known canyon area controlled by Native Americans 250 miles to the East of Grand Canyon.  The rocks and canyons we drove through were bright and colorful, but we were hoping to reach de Chelly before dark, and didn’t see any good spot to stop and capture the scene, so we drove through.

As we approached the Navajo-owned hotel at twightlight, the road was lined with bare cottonwood and Russian olive trees that looked like ghosts leading into Mordor.  Very eerie…

Upon checking into the hotel, we found that we have “high speed interent” for the first time all week.  Of course, “high speed” is relative, and the measured rate was actually about the same speed as the dial-up modems I used in the late 1970’s, at 1200 baud (seriously!). The only restaurant in the park is a cafeteria, which was out of pretty much all selections except hamburger and fries, and we just finished the worst such combination I can remember in many years.  Tomorrow we will go into town for some better food.

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Kindness is a language everybody understands.