BOXES 122-123: Out West: The Grand Canyon.

Here's the first picture I took of the Grand Canyon on the 1978 trip I took with Max and Gloria. I'd say it's one of my better ones in the set to follow (you can be the judge), with Max and a couple of trees to give perspective and with the Colorado River plainly visible at the bottom of the canyon. I'm pretty sure we are in the area of the National Park called Desert View, near the eastern entrance on the South Rim. We'd been in Monument Valley earlier in the day (see previous post), and set up camp quite near where this photo was taken. In 1978, around the beginning of June, you could just find a spot without an advance reservation.

The pictures that follow were all taken that afternoon. (This is my first post that covers just a few hours in time.) If I recall correctly, we took the Desert View Drive westward toward the Visitor Center/Park HQ and stopped at various lookout points, returning before dark to our campsite. What fascinated me most, besides the sheer grandeur of the space, were the endless contrasts of color: not only in the layers of rock but in the differences between up-close and farther-away, and of course in the shades brought out by the setting of the sun. Here are the next three shots I took:

The North Rim is a good deal higher in elevation than the South, as you can tell in the photo just above and in the next two:

In the following shot, with the pine trees in the foreground, you can see it was getting to be late afternoon:

Looking downward we could see a trail leading over a flat stretch of land before plunging deeper into the canyon (unless it just ended at a lookout point). The same trail is partly glimpsed in the bottom right of the second photo.

Here's Max again, with that trail now in the lower left of the frame, and the cleft of the deepest part of the canyon stretching up toward the right.

Shadows were deepening yet more, as you can see in these next shots, especially the ones looking upstream:

From one lookout you could see the river clearly downstream:

My zoom lens was useful for showing the rapids in this stretch of the river:

The following two shots, taken in fairly quick succession, show how rapidly the colors were changing as the sun was setting. (To be sure, I did switch to a new roll of film, as I see from the numbers on the slides, so that may account for some difference.)

The next two shots, the second with the camera pointed a bit more to the right, show a similar color contrast:

I loved the way the colors softened and turned more purplish as the sunset continued:

Either Max or Gloria took the following pictures of me. In the one with my back turned, I seem to be pretending to be a character in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, but it was unintentional.

Bright red cactus flowers drew our eyes from the canyon from time to time . . .

. . . as did this pine:

Here are some other desert flowers, with the river beyond:

The next five shots show the sun going down behind the rim:

At the same time the colors continued to change as we looked deeper into the canyon:

My last shot of the day was most likely taken from our campsite:

The next morning, as I recall, we continued to view the canyon from additional lookout posts near the Visitor Center and then headed onward (no lengthy hikes even partway into the canyon)--to Gloria's home in Santa Monica and then to Max's aunt's place near San Francisco. I'll report on these legs of the trip, and my eventual return to Wisconsin, in the next couple of posts. But for the rest of the trip I took many fewer photographs: maybe I had exhausted myself on the Grand Canyon (and earlier places like the Canyon de Chelly and Acoma), or I was running low on the budget I'd allotted for rolls of film. Anyhow, it's on to SM, the California coast, and SF in the next post.