Ileft out some details yesterday, it seems.
I am staying in a log cabin about 100 yards from the rim of the canyon. It looks very old. The bathroom is obviously a later addition, as is the electricity (old conduit runs along the interior wall and ceiling to the two lights, the light switch, and the single electrical outlet (opposite the phone line and desk, but I brought an extension cord).
The cabin is a duplex unit, and the dividing wall's timber and cement looks as old as the exterior walls, so I believe it was always two units. There is a rough-hewn door between the two sides. My neighbors are a couple with a young son. I haven't seen them yet, but the door isn't very soundproof, so I've heard the father snoring and the child laughing, crying, and playing his harmonica.
This isn't bad at all. They went to bed before I did last night and got up this morning after me (I'd already gone out to see the sunrise). If snoring kept me awake at night, I'd never get any sleep.
Yesterday at dusk, when I was walking along the head of Bright Angel Trail, I came upon five deer grazing. This was within forty feet or so of a cabin. They stopped as I approached, but they didn't run. They just kept the distance at about fifteen feet.
This morning first thing I went out to watch the sunrise from the lodge, no camera. Then I came back, checked my email, and got ready for the rest of the day.
It was a glorious morning, the sun bright, the sky blue, the clouds white, and the breeze cool. I drove about seventy miles today without leaving the park. I went to two different vantage points to take more pictures. At the second, Cape Royal, I followed a side path leading from the parking lot to a little pillar of rock surrounded on three sides by air. There was no rail here, no stairs down to it, nothing but me and the canyon. This was the only place I went where I had a clear view and could not see any other people.
I got the bright idea of trying a panoramic series of photographs. I did it here and at Cape Royal proper. I have no idea if they will turn out, but I sure went through some film in a hurry.
I picked up two hitchhikers as I left the Cape Royal parking lot. They were a German couple who had apparently hiked up there from the next viewing spot down. I just took them a couple of miles until either they'd reached their destination or they had decided they'd had enough of the music.
Back at the cabin I dropped off my camera gear, having decided that I'd had enough of that. OK, I kept the little snapshot camera with me, just in case. I wandered around the lodge area, checking out the gift shop and the bar. I had a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and spoke for a while to the bartender. A native of New England, she was here for the season. She's made several cross country drives. She gets off this afternoon and doesn't have to be back until Sunday afternoon, so she is driving to Flagstaff.
I went through the lodge to the outside area, where I sat in a rocking chair and put my feet on a wall right on the rim. For the next two hours I wrote a few postcards, talked to the old couple next to me (they are from Tucson and are spending a few days visiting the Grand Canyon and the southern Utah national parks. They talked about finding camping at Zion, so I guess they are in an RV), but mostly just watching the shadows of the clouds slowly creep across the canyon.
I came back to the cabin, wrote the previous part of this, and then went back to the lodge to watch the sunset. It was a good thing I'd retired the camera, since the whole area was bristling with tripods.
I met two University of Tennessee students in the gift shop. One was buying a pair of fertility symbol earrings. We spoke about UT and related things while we waited in line. I wished her luck with the earrings as we parted.
I had anice dinner at the lodge restaurant at eight, waited for the full moon to get a little higher in the sky, and then walked out to Bright Angel Point. The path was dark but not too dark once my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight.
I could finally see the location of Grand Canyon Village on the south rim because of the lights, but the far side of the canyon was invisible in the moonlight. The near side and the mountains inside, though, were lit most of the way down. Everything looked pale and unreal.
Tomorrow I head for Lake Powell, then south to maybe Petrified Forest National Park and Meteor Crater. I'm not exactly sure.