2/15/2020
Last night I stayed in Tusayan, right outside of the park. I wanted to get back to the park right away when I got up. As I was pulling out I hear a crash, look back and half a carafe of tea slid off the counter and all over the floor. It was not how I wanted to start my day. I had to wipe pretty much everything in from of my bed off and try to soak up as much out of the carpet as I could. At least it’s just tea on a black carpet so you can’t see the stain and it won’t smell. I put the fan on it while I was touring the park to help it dry out.
Once I got to the canyon I started hiking to the West of the visitors center. My first stop was at Yavapai Point. This has probably the best view in the whole canyon. This is one of the few places on the South rim that you can see the Colorado river. It had absolutely amazing views. From the point to the next visitor center there was the “Trail of Time”. They had markers every 3 feet designating 1000 years. This was to show how long it took the canyon to form. There were markers for 1.84 million years. At certain points they had a type of rock that was formed at that time.
The next stop on the Rim trail was the Verkamp’s Visitor Center, Hopi House, El Tavor Hotel, Lookout Studio, and Bright Angel Lodge. This got me to the end of the paved part of the Rim trail and the end of the Winter bus route. It was about a 3 mile hike on the rim with some great views. The El Tavor hotel was really neat and had a cool museum. Once I was done looking at everything I took the bus back to the Visitor Center and back to the van.
On my way back to Flagstaff I stopped at the Grand Canyon Brewing in Williams. This was a really neat brewpub that was made like a log cabin. They even had a waterfall in the entrance. They had one of the best Irish Red’s I’ve ever had. This is the only brewery that I’ve been to that sells 16 oz. and gallon sized growlers. It was crazy. I got to talk to a couple of older people that were just moving to Williams from Phoenix. They were fun to talk to and had to good stories.
Once I got back to Flagstaff I stopped at the last brewery that I hadn’t been to, Historic Brewing Company. They had 8 beer flights there so I got to try pretty much everything. They were pretty good for the most part. They had the slam dunk contest on. I haven’t watched one of those in forever and I remember why. All of the scoring is subjective, they get a minute to try to complete the dunk, and the judges kept giving the highest score of 50 out. It was really dumb.