Grand Canyon Village - 23rd October

Postcard XV, Grand Canyon Village, 23/10/94
The walk down the Colorado River and back is defintely worth doing. Ignored the signs warning you not to attempt it in a day (it took me 3 hours going down and 4 coming up, plus 1.5 hours for mrning tea and lunch, but the track is good enough to walk by torchlight, so you could take 12 hours over it if you wanted to), to carry 1 gallon (4 litres)
  (mk here: Danny! There's snakes out at night.)
per person for the 4 mile descent down South Kaibab (I drank 1/2 litre on the way down, 1.5 on the way up Bright Angel and there's water at the bottom) and that there's no shade (the track switches between the sides of a north facing ridge, so there's quite a lot of shade)--the thing that really slows one down is the continual stopping to gawk at the view and take photos!// The river iself is pretty big, and quite fast flowing (tehre are suspension bridges, two, for crossing) and very muddy. I've decided that if I ever come back I will raft/canoe the whole way through the canyon! (As with my plan to walk the Pacific Rim Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, I'd settle for doing part of this in practice.) You told me that you thought the world began at the Grand Canyon, but I think the world both begins and ends there--you walk through almost half the planet's history as you descend from the rim to the river. It's a geologist's heaven, and between my preparatory reading and the occasional sign pointing out a feature of particular geological interest, I really enjoyedmyself with the rocks. (There's another subject I'd love to study seriously!). The sudden burst of postcards from here is partly because the pictures are so pretty, but mostly because I don't have anything to read. The relative dearth of postcards while I've been staying in Phoenix is because I've not only had alll the books I've bought to read here,but also Sue's whole collection at my disposal. (There's a tv set in my room here, but US tv is just like Australian commercial tv, and the ads are too much to cope with.) I think this will be my last postcard--I'll probably get back home before later cards. I'm looking forward to seeing/corresponding properly with you all.
Danny