Day 10

When the sun began to shine directly on us, and it was getting too hot to sleep, I finally emerged from within the tent, and in the process, ungracefully stepped all over it and destroyed whatever tent-like shape it had left. We went in search for the shower, which costs $1.75 for 5 minutes. After the 30-some degree weather the night before, it was a great 5 minutes. I literally just stood under the hot water and didn't move. And by this point, we didn't even bother putting on makeup, and we just kept wearing the same sweatshirts. (If you actually look through our pictures, we looked progressively 'worse' as the trip went on.... it's pretty funny.) After eating a huge American breakfast, we went hiking down the Bright Angel Trail into the canyon.

The interesting part about hiking at the canyon is that the easy part comes first, then you have to come back up, so you have to take that into consideration when you decide when to turn around. As we were descending, we thought, 'hey, this isn't bad at all!' We saw older couples breathing heavily as they were passing us, and we said, 'is it really that bad coming up?!' Then a little while later, this athletic looking guy carrying his camping equipment stopped us and asked how much longer until the top. He was exhausted, apparently a lot of people hike down to the bottom and camp for a few nights, then hike back up (he'd been hiking for over 6 hours already!) Note to the single women who plan on visiting the Grand Canyon at some point, get in shape before you go and camp at the bottom of the canyon, that's where the athletic, single men are ;)

The views were SO magnificent!


As you walk down the trail, you get different perspectives and angles of the canyon, and you can see plant life that you can't see from the top. Originally, we were aiming for the 1.5 mile mark and then turning around, but it was an hour and we were still about 20 minutes away from it, so we decided to turn around at that point. Uh... we were more out of shape than some of the old people! Not even 5 minutes into the hike up, we had to stop to rest. But it's a good opportunity to take in the view, cuz when you're walking, it's best not to be looking around (there's no railing, if you misstep, it's down the canyon you go!) I'm proud of us for surviving the 2 hour hike, it's really worth it. The only downside is that you have to keep watching out for donkey poo everywhere. Yeah, I don't understand how people can feel comfortable riding on donkeys on those narrow paths.

After the hike, we went shopping for dinner supplies. Elena decided on making peppers and cheese sandwiches. I wanted chicken wings; I figured our fire was too weak to cook raw chicken, so I bought pre-cooked buffalo wings. This time, we paired our meal with wine cooler-ish drinks. It's not even 2pm at this point, so to keep our food fresh, we bought a huge pack of ice and made our own cooler out of plastic bags. It worked really well! We then took a shuttle tour of the canyon, stopping at various 'points' to see different parts of the canyon. It was so cool to see the Colorado River (we were so far away from it that the water doesn't look like it's even moving!) About an hour before the sunset, we found a good spot on the rocks facing the sun and waited for the sun to disappear behind the canyon. It was really beautiful to see the colors of the canyon change, but it hurt our eyes too much to look directly at the sun.

After the sun set, we still had about 30 minutes of daylight left, so we made our way back to our camp to start the fire and dinner. Mmmm, the chicken wings were SO good! The firewood again quickly disappeared, so we got ready for bed. Thank God it was about 10 degrees warmer than the previous night.