Westward Ho! (Part 1) - The Grand Canyon

Hey there everyone - or should I say, howdy! I apologize for being a little neglectful on this blog here since the first posting, but to be fair, Netflix binge-watching is hardly what I'd call good posting material. An EPIC, 10-day family vacation to the Wild West, on the other hand... now that's a different story. And that's the story I'm here to tell you! There's enough material here for a book, so I'm just gonna go over the highlights for the sake of expediency; even so, the summer 2015 exploits of the Cook family will take several posts to cover over the course of the next few days/weeks. To begin with, I'll go over a little background. As a graduation present for my sister and I (Heather's on her happy way to attend Stonehill College in the Fall), my parents sat us down with an offer.
"We can either do a no-holds-barred party for you guys, or, if you want, we'll do a vaca--"
"--TION" we both replied, immediately, and that was that .
Having never been out further West than Ohio, this trip was all uncharted territory for me; to be honest, it's unbelievable to think that we saw all the breathtaking, incredible things we did without ever leaving the borders of our own great country.

My plan here is to chronicle an adventure per blog; this first one is gonna focus on our time at the Grand Canyon and, fair warning, is on the longer side, but as I sit here confronted with the mountain of stories that need to be told, that seems to me the best way of doing it.

Before proceeding, there's a disclaimer that has to be gotten out of the way before we detail a single adventure. I'm a New England guy who's used to bitterly harsh winters, who ran for three hours in fifteen below temps this winter to train for a marathon... for lack of a better quote, "the cold never bothered me anyway." This was not. A. Cold. Trip.
"It's a dry heat" was the go-to platitude of everyone who we asked about the impending heat-pocalypse. To those people, I concede, yes, you were right. A dry heat is the kind found in your run-of-the-mill kitchen oven, and if you're an ice-blooded Northerner like me, the two are interchangeable.

Our first leg of the trip touched us down in Phoenix, Arizona, "the Grand Canyon State," and after picking up our rental car, we were soon melting away the miles towards that very attraction. I can't really be sly or tongue-in-cheek about our experience at Wild West's Natural Wonder of the World -- it's beyond anything else I've ever seen in my experience, and totally beyond my ability to describe. The canyon - if something this massive can still qualify as a "canyon" - stretches about ten miles across from north to south, and about three hundred from east to west. It's...grand. Yep. That name's making more and more sense, now I think about it...

The cameras on our iPhones were great (and very convenient), but even if we had the highest-end Nikons available, they still wouldn't be able to do this place justice. It's just something that has to be seen with the two best cameras you'll ever have access to - the ones about two inches apart on your face!

Heather was happy with the healthy amount of orange (her favorite color - can you tell?) to be found in Arizona's picturesque rocks

I looked, so I can confirm - the first step's a doozy

After heading back to the hotel to reinsert our eyes back in their sockets and a steak dinner that went straight in at one of the top five best I've ever eaten - they ain't lying about those famous Western steaks - we woke up at the crack of dawn the next morning for a hike down into the Canyon itself. We're a pretty active family, but in terms of adventures we've done all together, that had to rank pretty highly among them for sure.

The Canyon workers stressed over and over again the importance of water on the arid Canyon trails, to prevent dehydration. I assumed that held true for these bold guys as well.

Is photobombing still a thing when you're hiking the Grand Canyon? Is the Pope Catholic?

As you can imagine, this was one of the best mornings I've ever had. 100% spectacular.

We followed a series of switchback trails about a mile and half down into the canyon... and we didn't even come close to the bottom. 

The often-hairpin switchbacks meant that, whenever we weren't on the lookout for Jawas, we could grab cool shots like this

And this

And these!

I never could resist the opportunity to climb a precarious precipice (or ruin a beautiful scenic backdrop)

Beautiful all the way around

We then made the arduous trek back up to the Canyon's rim and napped it off the rest of that afternoon, before returning to the Canyon at a different location later that evening. The Desert Watchtower is the easternmost access point to the area, and it offers some pretty spectacular views at sunset.

That little ribbon of blue there is the Colorado River, and amazingly, is responsible for pretty much everything you're seeing here.

And (fitting as the end of this posting), the last thing we saw was one of the most unbelievable sunsets I've ever been privilege to. With some heavy clouds that may or may not have been from a wildfire (as Heather maintains) rolling in off the distant north rim, the sun's last rays cast some unreal colors on the vistas before us. When the whole thing was said and done, Dad was the one to sum it up pretty succinctly as he said, in his best impression of a movie director, "Anddddddd cut! Scene!"

My Mom and I agreed that if we threw a rock out far enough, it would smack into the green screen obviously creating these kinds of  images, because how could these views actually exist in real life? It beats me, but it was enough for me just to take it in. I'll be remembering that one for a while, you can bet.

That could have been an entire vacation in and of itself, but let me tell you: we're just getting started! Next stop -- Zion, Utah! See you there!!