Work, work, work.

With our co-hosts leaving before the last week of September and the closing of the campground before then end of October making it impractical to bring in new volunteers, we are going it alone for awhile.  Starting at 6:30 in the morning, taking a mid-day break and then finishing up at 10:30pm seven days a week is making for some long days.  But we only have to do this until the middle of October and then it is off to the east.  A 3,000 mile jaunt from northern Arizona to the southeast coast of Georgia.

We barely leave the campground now, save a trip to Lindbergh Hill two or three times a week to dump ashes.  Then there is the occasional trip to the lodge deli for a take-out pizza.  There has not been much time for sight seeing or getting the camera out but there were a couple of opportunistic occasions where the phone camera sufficed.

All summer long we have had 4 mule deer bucks hanging out together and making rounds through the campground.  As we have come into fall they have been putting on some pretty impressive racks and a little less inclined to be in close proximity to each other.  The other day on one of our trips to dump ashes (9 miles, one way) the big one of the bunch made an appearance at the roadside.

The only thing bigger than this muley's ears is his rack.  He is at least a ten point and got a lot of velvet shed hanging on.  Pretty healthy looking too, I guess the grazing is good in the campground.

The nights are getting significantly cooler too.  There have already been a couple of really hard freezes out in the meadow, down into the mid-20's, and has kicked off the color change in the Aspens.  We watched the yellow get brighter and brighter and on a particularly brilliantly blue-sky day took the opportunity to grab a couple of shots.

We are wearing heavier clothes every day now, warding off the approach of winter.  The sun is going down really early and heavy coats are necessary.  Gloves aren't bad either.  On evening rounds head lamps and flashlights are a must.  The cool summer was a real treat, no air conditioning was necessary, not once.  But now we are paying our dues and running at least one of our two 42,000 btu furnaces 'round the clock.  If it were not for extremely dry conditions there could easily be persistent snow on the ground.  We are really glad that the park service has us hooked up to a 1,000 pound propane tank.  One of my onboard tanks would not last three days at this rate of use.  Then it would be off to a 40 mile drive to get a refill.  The Grand Canyon Volunteer system really did it right when it came to providing propane.  Thank You! Grand Canyon Volunteer System.

Our "vacation" to the Grand Canyon (South Rim)

Two posts back I mentioned that we were going to take advantage of the last few days of our co-hosts being around and use our days off to go for a long weekend on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Last year we got over to Flagstaff for an overnight trip and, among other things, we day-tripped out to the South Rim.  We got a taste of what it was like with most of our time being spent at the extreme east end of the park, Desert View.

But there is much more to see and this year we are taking a three day weekend with almost the whole time dedicated to the South Rim.  Cyndee spent a couple of weeks trying to wrangle us a hotel room that was available on our days off, convenient to the South Rim and affordable.  Turns out that was a tall order.  First, finding any room that was available for two nights in a row was tough.  And if you got anywhere near, less than an hour away from the park entrance, the prices jumped well above $200/night.  I've paid that much for a room at five star hotels in the center of some of the worlds largest cities but we are talking Motel 6 here.  I just can't do it.  I kind of expected high prices during the peak season when the kids were out of school and everybody was on vacation.  But now, with newly-weds and nearly-deads being about the only ones around I would have expected a big drop in prices.  Not so.  It seems there are enough of them to keep everything full and the demand high.

Cyndee kept looking and moved as far away as Williams, AZ, a town about an hour's drive to the park entrance and billing itself as "Gateway to the Grand Canyon".  The prices were still too high for the quality of the accommodations but at least they were under $200/night.

Williams is a sleepy little town of 3,000 in which Route 66 was still the active highway for going west or east until 1984 when I-40 finally bypassed it.  Williams kept Route 66 alive through a series of lawsuits that prevented I-40 from being completed in this part of Arizona.  But agreements were finally reached and one year after the opening of the last stretch of I-40, Route 66 was decommissioned.  Despite its small size, Williams is home to Southwest Chief Amtrak route and the southern terminus of the Grand Canyon Railway.

Williams is like Winslow, AZ and Albuquerque, NM; they have done a pretty good job of recreating a nostalgic look to the main drag of town and creating businesses that are attractive to tourists.

Gas stations and car dealerships from the 40's and 50's are converted to eateries.

No matter where we go there are always murials.

While Williams was interesting, our main objective was still to be achieved.  We made the hour long trip by driving somewhat parallel to the Grand Canyon Railroad to Grand Canyon Village.  This place is WAY different than the North Rim.  Everything is a big production over here.  The roads along the rim are not open to private vehicles.  Instead, huge shuttle busses run up and down the South Rim between the village and Hermit's Rest with 13 overlook stops in-between.

Normally we are not too keen on being transported around like a bunch of livestock but in this case the shuttle really is a good deal.  To begin with it is free, or more appropriately, it is included in your entrance fee of 25 dollars.  Secondly they are frequent.  You can get off a shuttle at an overlook, spend five minutes, or an hour, and when you go back to the shuttle-stop the wait is only a few minutes at worst.  And not having to drive means I can enjoy the view too.



This map of the shuttle system is not readable in this small format but you can get an idea of the scale and complexity.

Last year we made it 30 miles to the east of the edge of this map, out to Desert View.  This year we want to get all the way to the west end at Hermit's Rest.  We parked Big Gulp at the Geology Museum parking lot and in a couple minutes were on a shuttle.  Our first stop was the transfer station from the blue line to the red line shuttles.  Once we were on the red line we were in new territory for us.  One of the biggest differences between where we had been living and working for the past five months was that on the North Rim it is rare to ever be able to see the Colorado River.  But from the South Rim it is visible from practically everywhere.

Hard to see in this little bitty picture, but that is the Colorado way down there.

A significant bit of zoom helps bring the river into view.

The above rapids are one of many of the rapids that John Wesley Powell and his crew had to pilot their wooden boats through as the first pioneers to navigate the whole of the Grand Canyon.

Ten miles in the distance lies the North Rim Lodge.  Even with some fairly powerful binoculars we could not make out any familiar structures.

What would one of my posts be without a panorama.

After a number of stops for picture taking we arrived at Hermit's Rest.  This place represents the end of the paved road but is also the jumping off point for a foot trail that leads into the canyon.  It is not a famous trail like Bright Angel or North Kaibab but it is a well used trail.

Hermit's Rest is another Mary Colter creation.  Built in 1914 as a waypoint/rest stop for tourists traveling by coach and operated by the Fred Harvey Company.  The place is named after a Canadian prospector named Louis Boucher that, around 1891, was living alone at nearby Dripping Springs and with help, essentially hand-dug the Hermit Trail into the canyon still in use today.  The building was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

Unlike other structures on the South Rim, Hermit's Rest is not a grand structure.

At first glance it looks a bit rickety, but this was by design.  This building has stood strong for 100 years.

The building may not be grand but the fireplace sure is.  The fireplace is a room unto itself and is dug back into the hillside.

 

Back at the village we strolled down to the train station.  They only run one round-trip train per day and it had already come and gone.  The place was deserted and locked up so all we could do was look in the window of the depot and take in the static display of the an old steam engine and coal tender.

 





From the depot we went back up to the village and started taking in the lodges, museums and shops.  One of our favorites was the Kolb Studio.  Two brothers built a wood-frame structure that hung out over the edge of the canyon.  The brothers operated their photography studio for decades and has endured for more than a century.  They even pioneered the use of projectors and showed films they had made of the canyon using the technology of the time, carbon arc lit projectors.

While we were there the studio was undergoing a year-long renovation project.

 The studio is now operated by The Grand Canyon Association as a book store and gift shop.  We met a couple that was operating the store that day and discovered that they too were volunteers for the association and fulltimers like us.

Cyndee out on the patio of Kolb Studio.

Kolb Studio on its perch of the south rim of the Grand Canyon.

 

Turning 180 deg and the El Tovar Hotel comes into view.  Like almost everything else in this part of the canyon, its old.  It opened a year after the Kolb Studio in 1905.

 



They used the same color paint on the inside as the outside.  It is dark in there.

No kidding, its dark inside.

 

Just across the street from the El Tovar is another Mary Colter building, Hopi House.  Built to exemplify the historical inhabitant's pueblo dwellings it was commissioned by the Harvey House Company as a market for Native American crafts.  And it still is today.

 

There were countless more shops and museums and we put a pretty good dent in getting to many of them.  There was very little down-time in our three two night adventure.  We planned on getting an early start back to the North Rim on our third day so that we could get in a helicopter tour on our way by.  But as luck would have it, the weather closed in and everything was grounded.  We are headed back to our camp host job on the North Rim and the beginning of the end of our summer assignment.  Our co-hosts will be finishing their last three days and we will start working seven days a week for awhile.

Something different

Okay, in my last post I said that the volunteer job of camp hosting had become monotonous and that there was not much new or different worth writing about.  But just when we thought we had seen everything, somebody shows us different.

It is not unusual to see motor coaches that have been built from the shells of busses.  In fact, these bus conversions are some of the most expensive, luxurious coaches on the road.  Sometimes costing several million dollars.  Of course there are more economical versions and in some cases an individual will salvage an old school bus and refashion it into an RV.  They will replace or cover over the windows with interior walls and cabinets, the rows of seats are jettisoned with a galley, bath and living quarters in their place.  The familiar yellow and black exterior of the school bus is painted over to reflect the personality of the occupants.  We have seen everything from modern commercial graphics, like a factory RV paint job, to giant murals, to canned spray paint jobs that look like something from the flower power days of the '60's.  But today we saw something that was none of this.

Last night we did the normal routine of writing permits and posting them on the campsite for people that had not arrived by the time the registration kiosk had closed.  It is common for us to do eight or ten of these and when we make the first rounds at sun up the next day, half or more will have made it in sometime during the night.  This morning was no different and as I swung down the road to check on the late arrival to campsite number 69, the vehicle occupying the space immediately stood out from its surroundings.

There it was, a bright yellow school bus, one of the short ones.  From a distance it looked as though a misguided bus driver had just left the school yard and was trolling the campground to end kid's summer vacation early.

 Pulling closer and alongside, some "modifications" became visible.  While all the original windows were intact they were covered with beach towels.  The original equipment bi-fold walk-through doors were still there and apparently the primary way to get in and out of the ....camper?  The door was still operated by linkage and a lever next to the driver seat.  Still, this bus looked authentic enough that I caught myself looking for the name of the school district painted on the side, but that had been removed.  However, the license plates did say Alaska.

I had hoped that one of the beach towel curtains would be opened to see whether the inside had been modified or maybe meet one of the occupants to ask them about it.  But neither occurred, by the next time I came around (which was less than an hour), they were gone.

As I moved around to the front of the bus one other modification became apparent.  Normally, where the large black lettering is declaring "SCHOOL BUS" it had been changed to reveal what these people were really up to.

That explains a lot.

One of the Arizona Strip's Gems.

There has been almost an eight week lapse in our postings.  Up until about the end of September it was a choice not to write.  There simply was nothing but the same old thing; check campers in, check campers out, clean fire pits.  Same ol', same ol'.  After almost five months of camp hosting at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon there is not a lot of fresh things to write about the volunteer work. 

But now, near the end of September, our co-hosts, Gary and Jo are about to wrap up their six weeks at the North Rim.  We have been working out strategies for getting his rig out of the half of the camp host site he is in.  They are in the position we were in last year.  They too have a relatively long fifth wheel trailer. 

This is the camp host site configuration.  Two rigs in a large, flat-bottom 'U' shape driveway.  This photo is last year.  This year we are parked where the white RV is and our co-hosts are parked where we are in this image.

 One of the things you learn in a short time of driving one of these truck/trailer combinations is that, unless it is a perfectly straight drive in, it is impossible to back out of somewhere on the exact same path that you drove in on.  A near 90 degree turn in the driveway and giant ponderosa pine trees lining both sides of the driveway makes it impossible for all but the smallest of truck/trailers to back out of his half of the host site.  A medium to small size class A or C could probably get backed out too.  But that is not what we have and Gary is looking at doing what we did last year, which is to drive straight out through campsite number 45. 

This was us last year, looking through campsite number 45.  We are hitched up and about to pull out through number 45, weaving our way between power pedestals, water spigots and fire rings.  Gary will have the extra challenge of slipping by the end of our rig.  I offered to hitch up and pull out of the way but he waved me off.

The big difference is that when we did it last year the government had shut down and the campground was empty.  For Gary we are going to have to time his departure to be between the departure of the people camping in site number 45 and the arrival of the next campers.  At worst he will have a one hour window between 11:00am check-out time and 12:00pm check-in.  But with the North Rim being a long way from anywhere and the relatively slow progress one makes moving a large rig, it is preferred to start your drive much earlier than the middle of the day.  We'll see how it goes.

But in the mean time we have a couple of weeks before they go and we are going to take advantage of the last few days off we will have in our tenure at the North Rim.  Last year we only superficially visited the South Rim, this year we want to spend more time and get a more thorough look at all the South Rim has to offer.  We are going to get a hotel room in Williams, AZ and make the one hour drive to and from the park each day.  We'll use the shuttle bus system inside the park to get to all the overlooks and vista points we want to see.

But even before that, we have another sight to see.  Near Tuba City, about half-way between the North Rim and Flagstaff, AZ are a pretty interesting bunch of animal tracks; really old tracks.  As in millions of years old.  There are hundreds of them fossilized in the sandstone that has been dated at between 200 to 202 million years old, the early Jurassic period.  They are on Navajo land and tended to by small group of residents that live in a nearby bunch of homesteads.  Like virtually every other wide spot in the road, there are booths set up selling jewelry, art, crafts and weavings by local artists.  But these people are also the guides to and through the dinosaur tracks.

To call this place wide open is an understatement.

But even out here commerce springs up.

We chose our guide, Isabella was her name and she was shy only a few years of being as old as the fossils.  She had a narrative that she recited as we went along but asking questions was not really an option because her English skills did not extend beyond her memorized narrative and my Navajo  was even less.

Isabella on the right.  No clue who that is on the left.

Regardless, the fossil tracks were a sight to see.  The hours of driving and the couple dozen gallons of diesel to get here was worth it.

To make the tracks easy to see they are filled with water.  In addition to the ones that are wet, there are a slew of dry ones crisscrossing all over the place.

To give it a little scale, Cyndee put a foot alongside one of the tracks.  These were either Coelophysis kayentakatae or Dilophosaurus, both, indeed all tracks at this site, were made by carnivores.

This track was so well preserved that the claws are clearly visible.

Some of the prints must have been made on a rainy day as they are sunk deep and have a "squishy" appearance.

Not all the tracks are quite so easy to see, or as small.  Here the guides have outlined a faint print with rocks to help those of us with an untrained eye to see better.



And again, Cyndee steps in to give a little scale to the subject.  This critter was huge.

Despite our guide's decades of leading tourists through the track beds it did little for accuracy of the narrative.  We were told that the large track in the photo above was that of a T. rex, but there is no way it can be.  The rock, and the tracks in them pre-date the age of T. rex.  T. rex was an inhabitant of the late Cretaceous period, the period that saw the end of all dinosaurs. Our tracks today were formed during the Jurassic period, (arguably the golden age of dinosaurs) more than 130 million years before T. rex existed.

Our guide was also quick to point out dinosaur eggs and dinosaur poop.  Dinosaur eggs are a high order of rare, dino poop, not so much.  But in our case today, neither of these fossils are.  Instead, both apparent fossils are what is known as iron concretions.

Dinosaur egg - not.

If this were real dino poop (properly known as coprolite), one could surmise that this beast was having a bad day.

Regardless of the inaccurate narrative of our guide we were impressed with the tracks.  They were the real deal and we physically touched the footprint that a creature left behind 200 million years ago.

To put a little more context to what we saw I did a little wiki'ing and came up with some artist's renderings of what our dinos probably looked like based on skeletal and skin fossils found all over western North America.

These guys stood about six feet tall and were around 18 feet long, nose to tail tip.  They were fast, agile and may have been lone hunters.  But the collection of tracks here on Colorado Plateau would suggest that they at least frequented a common place.

If you get to the Arizona Strip make the extra effort to find this paleontology gem.