YCGL - Monday, March 13, 2023 - Grand Canyon to Navajo National Monument

 I'm sneaking this blog in between two I've already written to maintain the timeline, and tell about the drive from the Grand Canyon to Navajo National Monument..  

After the adventure last night riding the electric bike around the Grand Canyon, I slept really well.  REALLY well.  One of the best night's sleep of the trip.  Fear and massive exercise will do that to you.  But the alarm woke me at 9:30 and I didn't have to hook up to leave and I had time before the 11:00 checkout, so I fixed eggs for breakfast.  And fried up some bacon.  And just enjoyed my morning.  I loaded up the bike and got off at 11:10.  

I wanted to make several stops on the way to Navajo NM.  The campground there is first come, first serve and I checked that it wasn't full, so I was fine with ambling over there, 143 miles less than 3 hours.  

The first stop was to Yavapai Point and the geology museum there, but the turnoff had a sign saying no vehicles over 25 something feet.  No problem, I'll just go to the next stop and pull the bike and ride back there.  The next stop was Mather Point and the Grand Canyon Visitors Center.  Cool, and it has dedicated RV parking.  Well, that's one of the premier viewpoints and stops and the parking lot for the RVs was filled with cars.  I drove around the loop twice and there was nothing open that I could fit in.  My bad.  Who would have thought that it wouldn't be crowded at 12:00.  Duh!  So, I had a good afternoon yesterday and I've seen parts of the canyon that most of them would not, so I could go on.  

There were a couple of other viewpoints that I remembered driving the motorhome into and I wouldn't have problems driving in there.  Yaki Point is closed to private vehicles and Grandview, that I really wanted to stop at for a picture, had vehicles parked on the side of the road way beyond the parking lot.  After waiting to drive around, I looked as good as I could as I drove around the loop and headed east again.  Skunked!

Luckily, there were several pulloffs on the side of the road that had open spots I could get in to, so I did that.  

This is a view of the entire eastern side of the Grand Canyon.  

Vishnu's Temple

There is a whole pantheon of Norse, Roman and Hindu Temples throughout the valley.  

I like the color and the layering of this one.

The last stops were full of people coming in from the east entrance, so it was time to bit farewell to the overwhelming vistas of the canyon.  I wonder what it will look like when I'm back in a million years.

East of the the entrance puts you on the Navajo Reservation, and from the lush canyon to the desert flats.  Its hard to imagine the rainfalls required for any canyon building in this arid environment.  But it works.  

The next community is Cameron, AZ  I got some of the cheapest diesel of the trip there, and a green chili beef and bean chimichanga.  The station is a landmark, and what could go wrong with a chimi.  I paid for it twice, through the next day.  But it was good to start.  :)

I drove past Tuba City.  The town is off the road a bit, with a population of 8600.  What is special to me about Tuba City is that is the site of one of the uranium tailings impoundments (really just a dump site) developed in the 1950s and became a Department of Energy Uranium Cleanup site.  It was one of 11 or 12 sites that were being remediated in the late 1970s-early 1980s by having an earth cover put over the dump. My PhD dissertation investigated the settlement that would occur there under the weight of the overburden, and the potential for the earth cover to crack over time, say 10,000 to 100,000 years.  Many of the other graduate students in my group were going out and sampling the material and coming back and testing the samples in the lab.  I was in the library learning multiphase thermodynamics and programming the theory to be used with the test results.  Anyway, I have "fond" regards for Tuba City, and Mexican Hat, and Moab, and Shirley Basin in Wyoming and a bunch of other communities in the west for funding (in part, I was also teaching to pay the bills) my PhD.  

The last stop was Navajo National Monument.