CuRVWander

A break form our camp hosting duties for an anniversary lunch at the Kaibab Lodge came with a bonus this week.  In the span of just a couple of miles we spotted a slug of wildlife.  One in particular we were excited to see were wild turkey.  We have been scouting for turkey in all the places we frequently saw them last year with no luck.  On this day there were two hens, each with a brood right alongside the main highway, just outside the entrance station to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Even though I was about 300 yards away, this hen was keeping an eye on what I was doing. Cyndee is a great critter spotter.  This comes in most handy when we are making the 25 mile drive between Jacob Lake and just past the entrance station.  This road is thick with deer along the entire length and buffalo in the last five miles from just outside the entrance station to just inside.  If you are driving this road in the twilight or dark hours it is tr...

Point Sublime is a scenic overlook that is approximately 18 miles west of the North Rim Campground.  But unlike the other scenics you can drive to on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, the road to Sublime is not paved.  It is 18 miles of rutted, rocky, high clearance dirt road.  But the payoff for an hour of bumping, jolting and dust eating is a view worthy of its name. Keeping with our goal of getting out and seeing the sights this year instead of spending most of our time in the campground, Point Sublime was high on our list.  We would have been out to this point long before now but as luck would have it, the last weekend in May there was a lightning strike that started a fire that burned for weeks and kept Point Sublime Road closed for all of June and July.  But it is open now and we are on our way. Eighteen miles does not sound all that far, but when it is a rough dirt road and an average speed of 5 mph (not to mention stopping every few minutes to t...

By the end of June the work horse of the camp host job, our all electric ATV, had no tread left on the tires and the brakes had worn completely through the caliper pads and the caliper pistons grinding on the rotors was all that was stopping us.  We had told the people responsible for maintenance of this equipment that it needed work done on it last September, but with the government shutdown on the 1st of October everything went to the wayside.  Even when the government re-opened a couple weeks later it did not matter because the North Rim was shut down for the winter and all but a skeleton crew had been furloughed until May of this year. Aside from Cyndee, the ATV is the hardest working member of the camp host crew. On the first of July the ATV was just not possible to drive anymore.  It was finally retrieved and dispatched to St. George, UT, 3 hours away, for much needed maintenance.  The guys that took it had hopes that they might return with it the same da...

Typically the summer season of the North Rim Campground (May 15th thru Oct 15th) is divided into two halves for campground hosts.  Last year we had the second half, August until the end of October.  But the government shutdown cut us short almost 30 days.  This year we were asked to work the whole season, and then some, coming in early May and staying until the end of Oct or until snow falls, whichever comes first. But our co-hosts, three year veterans of the North Rim, signed up for the first half and the time has come for them to return to southern Arizona and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  To wish them bon voyage the rangers in the fees group (the group that the camp hosts work for) put together a pizza and roasted marshmallow get together. The monsoon had begun on the 4th of July and the weather had been pretty sketchy for these last days of the month.  We were not sure if we were going to get rained out or not but we planned our outdoor/c...

Hard to believe, at least for me, that we have been up here on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for our second summer, almost six months of living on the rim, and we have yet to set foot on the most famous trail of the north side.  The North Kaibab Trail is the only trail (actually there are a couple others but they do not connect to the south rim trails) that makes it possible to walk from the top of the north rim to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and ultimately connect to one of two trails that can be climbed to the top of the south rim.  It is high time to fix that. The National Park Service website describes the North Kaibab Trail as "The least visited but most difficult of the three maintained trails of the Grand Canyon."  From our campsite in the campground it is just under a mile walk to the Kaibab trailhead.  A relatively flat hike all the way to the trailhead but once you set foot on the Kaibab Trail there is no mistake that the trail ...