The Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is the most beautiful piece of geography I have been lucky enough to see. There have been far better things written about the grand canyon than I could possibly do justice to here, so I'm not going to say all that much other than the actual experience of seeing the whole thing can't properly be put into words. The really interesting part is that that the perspective is actually even hard to process in real time (yeah there is the robotics guy talking) when you are standing there: it is simply so large and open that it doesn't look like it could be real. This is not an easy thing to capture with a camera, so what you mainly get are nice broad landscapes, or close-ups with lots of rock detail but little perspective on size. It's especially hard to get good pictures given the popularity of the place. There are an unbelievable number of tourists there considering it is a reasonable drive from most anywhere. Prior to this year I'd only been to the grand canyon in summer, and while you could still appreciate both the beauty of the place and what the atmosphere must have been like in its early days as a national park, the number of people in summer is just overwhelming. So when I had a year where my exam schedule worked out to give me a few days close to Christmas, I thought it would be a good opportunity to see the canyon in winter, and when most of the tourists would be busy doing christmas shopping.

It turned out this was a really good idea. There were a few people hanging around the village, but once you got onto the rim road (which is open to vehicle traffic in the off season) there was virtually no one. You could sit forever without anybody jostling you, take pictures without people getting into them, and climb over the barriers without anybody to moan about it. The temperature was around 8c or so, so definitely not shorts weather even for me, but it was still comfortable for hiking around.

I ended up trying to take a bunch of stitched panoramas to give an idea of the perspective:

And even better, a one minute video, alone at the grand canyon. Good for meditating with on those stressful days :)

Some other images, images, including a big drop underneath my feet:

   

And finally, after the Canyon visit there is nothing cooler than spending some time in the desert. I wandered around and photographed saguaros & just enjoyed the emptiness.

 

The last one is a really well known cristate saguaro outside the Old Main on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson, they're incredibly rare & beautiful things. It's a re-pose of a younger me (and younger cactus!) that is often in the front page picture rotations. I also took another video to show the details of the cactus crest.