Photos

When you're coming from south of the Grand Canyon and your heading towards Grand Canyon Village, you pass through Kaibab National Forest. Then all of the sudden you reach the rim and you take a right turn. After driving for about a minute you can see the first parked cars and then... you get out of your car and you have your first 'Grand Canyon - breath -taking - moment'....
Especially with that enormous thunder storm hanging over the north rim you can see in the back!

Some facts about the Canyon;
The Grand Canyon is a colorful steep-sided gorge carved by the Colorado River in the U.S. state of Arizona. It is largely contained within the Grand Canyon National Park — one of the first national parks in the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt was a major proponent of preservation of the Grand Canyon area, and visited on numerous occasions to hunt and enjoy the scenery.


South Rim December 2006


September Storm on the South Rim, 2007
The canyon, created by the Colorado River over a period of 6 million years, is 277 miles (446 km) long, ranges in width from 4 to 18 miles (6.4 to 29 km) and attains a depth of more than a mile (1.6 km). Nearly two billion years of the Earth's history have been exposed as the Colorado River and its tributaries cut their channels through layer after layer of rock while the Colorado Plateau was uplifted.
During prehistory, the area was inhabited by Native Americans who built settlements within the canyon and its many caves. The Pueblo people considered the Grand Canyon ("Ongtupqa" in Hopi language) a holy site and made pilgrimages to it.[citation needed]
The first European known to have viewed the Grand Canyon was García López de Cárdenas from Spain, who arrived in 1540.[1]
The Grand Canyon was largely unexplored until after the U.S. Civil War. In 1869, Major John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran with a thirst for science and adventure, made the first recorded journey through the canyon on the Colorado River. He accomplished this trek with nine men in four small wooden boats, though only six men completed the journey. Powell referred to the sedimentary rock units exposed in the canyon as "leaves in a great story book".