Visitors to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon are so Entertaining.

Grand Canyon National Park, what an awesome, inspiring and breath-taking place.  But it is a park divided, the South Rim is convenient to a major interstate highway, has a railroad and runs shuttle buses up and down popular view points for fourteen hours a day 365 days a year.  The South Rim has a multitude of lodging options, I-MAX theater, and you are within minutes of well stocked grocery stores and restaurants.  The digital age has found its way to the South Rim as well.  This ease of access and facilities on a year around basis draws five million visitors a year.  A mere ten miles away, as the raven flies, is the North Rim.  Buried in ten feet of snowfall during the winter it is only open from mid-May to mid-October.  There is no interstate or major highway even remotely close.  A trip to the North Rim is not a visit of convenience, it is a place that you need to make plans to get to.  Basic services are Spartan at best.  There is the North Rim Lodge with it rustic cabins, there are no rooms in the lodge itself, and its dining room with gourmet prices for mediocre dishes.  I once got a pasta dish that had marinara sauce that was little more than ketchup with Italian seasoning sprinkled in.  But the other side of the coin is that I could make an entire meal off of their miniature bread loaves with chunks of garlic in it and an olive oil and herb dipping sauce.  Wuf.

Let me get back to making the point of this post.  The North Rim may be only ten miles from the South Rim but they are worlds apart.  Everything on the North Rim is a smaller scale and advances in civilization lag a good twenty years behind.  The remoteness of the place is the biggest factor in all this.  To drive to the North Rim from the South Rim is a solid five hours, if you can do it non-stop.  From Flagstaff it is 4.5 hours, Las Vegas 6 hours, Salt Lake City 7 hours, Phoenix 9.5 hours, Las Angeles 10 hours.  You just do not casually decide to pop over to the North Rim for a look-see.  It would be most difficult to drive in from any major population center and do more than just turn around and go back as a day-trip.  If you are to see or do anything on the North Rim it requires an overnight stay.  And most of the 500,000 visitors (one tenth of the visitors to the South Rim) do it that way, either staying in the lodge or campground, but since those spaces are few, many stay at lodges and campgrounds that are in the National Forest 20 miles away, adjacent to the National Park or 45 miles away in Jacob Lake.  And then there are those that want to stay "in town" and will day trip from our closest one, Kanab, UT 85 miles away.

The scenery on the North Rim is different too.  From the south side the Colorado River is visible from virtually every viewpoint, from the north it is a real chore to find a place you can see it at all.  The north side is a couple thousand feet higher than the south and the Kaibab Plateau that forms the north side of the canyon is heavily wooded with giant ponderosa pine and aspen trees.  The south is more desert-like in vegetation and temperature. 

View from the South Rim.
Colorado River almost always in view.  Scrub oak & juniper prominent.
See the cliffs sticking up in the distance?  That's the North Rim.

View from the North Rim.
No river in sight.  The South Rim's plateau is a couple thousand feet below in the distance.
Ponderosa pine, aspen and fir everywhere on the north side.

Highest point on the North Rim and entire National Park.

Both north and south rims line the 277 miles of river within the National Park.  The stretch of river within the park affords river rafters trips that last from one to 10 days of a combination of gentle floating and heart-pounding rapids.  The South Rim Village and the only place you can drive to on the North Rim lie approximately mid-way of the river that is book-ended by Lake Powell (Page, AZ) to the north-east and Lake Mead (Las Vegas, AZ) to the south-west.  Try this link if you want to see a map of what that looks like.

I hope by now that I have provided an adequate amount of description to convey the vastness of Grand Canyon National Park and the contrast between the north and south rims.  If I have, you will enjoy the anecdotes to follow.

Already, just in these few, short opening weeks of the North Rim we have had a number of visitors that have had difficulty in grasping the scale and remoteness of where they are.  And it has not seemed to matter whether the visitors are from distant continents or within the contiguous 48.  Just this week we had two of the biggest class C motorhomes I have ever seen pull up to the registration kiosk.  The passenger of one of the rigs got out and came to the window, reservation in hand.  You could tell it had been a long day, or maybe a long week.  Fatigue was clear on her face.  She handed me her paper work and I cross-checked the name on her reservation with the master list for the day.  I could find no match. When I looked at the paper she had handed me more closely I asked her where she thought she was.  "Mather" was the reply.  Mather campground is one of several campgrounds on the South Rim.  It took three attempts to get her to understand where she was and when she finally did she said; "Oh well, it is only ten miles to the other side according to the map.  How do we get to the bridge that goes across?"  When Cyndee and I finally convinced her that there was no bridge she began to return to her rig but was met by the driver of the other rig.  From our window in the registration kiosk we could see a passionate discussion ensue, first with hand gestures and then arm gestures with lots of upper body movement.  The face on the driver of the other rig changed from questioning to mouth-open disbelief and then to realization and fuming mad.  That is when the conversation became loud enough to be heard.  I don't speak German but I am pretty sure that the words he was spewing in the direction of the driver of the first rig contained a few that would have got my mouth washed out with soap around my house.

After a pow-wow in the lead rig and a close scrutiny of maps with retracing of their steps they discovered that they had made a wrong turn at the one and only intersection on the route that goes south out of Page, AZ.  The road from Page connects with AZ 89A a good number of miles south of Page.  You either go right (north) to Marble Canyon and eventually Jacob Lake (the gateway to the North Rim) or left (south) towards Flagstaff and eventually the South Rim.  Now, fully grasping their situation they were returning to our window asking if there were any campsites available.  They did not receive the news very well that every site was booked six months in advance and that there we no cancelations for a single site let alone two.  It was late in the day, the sun was setting and the hordes of deer would soon be coming to the road's edge to graze.  They were looking at a minimum 45 mile drive and playing deer dodge the whole way with two huge class C's.  And they would need a good amount of luck to find a spot open at Jacob Lake.  Chances were pretty high that they would have to go all the way to the South Rim so they could get access to the sites they have reserved.  If they were lucky they may make it before the sun comes up tomorrow.

Another evening at the registration kiosk we were approached by a family.  The dad leaned into the window and with obvious frustration wanted to know where all the water falls and lakes were.  "We have been all over, taken every paved road (there are only three in all of the North Rim) and can't find any signs pointing to the water falls and lakes", he said.  For a moment I was like a deer in headlights, trying to process what he was asking.  Cyndee reached over and pushed up on my chin to close my mouth and all I could think to do was ask they guy; "What water fall"?  He began waiving his hands and gesturing broadly saying; "You know, the lakes.  The big water falls."  Then he finally said something that sounded like he was talking about Lake Mead.  And with that little bit of information we could imagine that the falls he was asking about might be Havasu Falls.

We explained that both of those outdoor wonders were best accessed from Las Vegas but since he was already at the North Rim the drive, at least to Havasu Falls, would be shorter now if he went via Flagstaff.  And regardless of which way he went he had at least eight hours of driving ahead of him.  At that point he confessed that; "We have been watching too much TV".  Evidently they had watched a nature program that did an aerial tour of northern Arizona, and since it only took an hour to watch they thought all the sights they had seen on their small screen could be driven to and viewed in about the same time!  Seriously, did no one get out a map and even make a casual estimate of the distances involved?  Oh, and by the way, after you drive eight to ten hours it is a multi-hour hike to the falls or a helicopter ride if you can afford the luxury.

Sadly the answer is no, and not just by this family.  We have stories like this being repeated almost daily now.  And that is just the ones we hear about, there are bound to be a bunch we never know about.