Sorry for the Group Email

Las Vegas looks sadder in daylight. The empty lots look bigger, and the neon adorning the casinos isn’t bright enough to overcome the morning sun in the desert.

We slid out of town and headed for the Hoover Dam; partly because the Hoover Dam is one of the most impressive man-made spectacles in the world, partly because the Hoover Dam is on the way to the Grand Canyon.

Here’s a genuine piece of travel advice for anyone going to the Hoover Dam: don’t pay for parking. Approach the dam from the Nevadan side and you’ll find a large, multi-story carpark that will charge you an optimistic US$7, before funnelling you towards the museum and gift shop. Cross over the dam, however, to the Arizonan side, and there are four or five large, free car parks in which you can park, apparently, for as long as you want.

Of course, we didn’t realise this until we were across the Dam. In fact, we crossed the dam three times, twice on foot, and then once again in the car. On foot, of course, is best, because you can peer over the surprisingly-low wall and speculate as to how many times you would flip over before you lost consciousness, or crashed fatally into the concrete at the bottom. The Hoover Dam is more than seven hundred feet tall: it starts more or less vertical, then tapers into a steep, sloping curve towards the bottom. It cost – and you can skip to the next paragraph if you’d rather not learn anything – three-quarters of a billion dollars to build in modern money, and more than two hundred people died during its five-year construction.

There are a few places you can visit the Grand Canyon. This isn’t surprising, as the Grand Canyon is, by absolutely any standard you care to measure it by, immense. You can see it from space. It’s ten miles across and nearly a mile deep. It is, in short, quite something.

There was quite the palaver in 2007 when the Skywalk over the Grand Canyon opened. I vividly remember watching it on TV. A newsman looking just a little shaky, if I recall, stepped out onto a cantilevered bridge that hung sixty-five feet out over the canyon. Even when the canyon isn’t at its full mile-deep, you could still drop a penny and wait a very long time to hear it hit the bottom, so standing on a glass bridge over one of nature’s most impressive abysses must be one of the more reliable ways to prompt oneself into accidental urination.

The land on which the Skywalk stands, however, is a national park, as far as I can tell. National Parks, in the United States, are reasonably-priced, and the Grand Canyon will set you back US$25 per vehicle. But the Skywalk is at the Grand Canyon West, which is two hundred miles from the actual Grand Canyon park, and is on a Native American reservation. The Native Americans in question are the Hualapai tribe, and in an apparent (to say nothing of successful) bid to squander the goodwill owed to them by America, have priced their slither of the Grand Canyon at stunningly optimistic prices. If you want to go and look at the Skywalk, you’ll need to shell out US$29.95, which will buy you parking, a “Hualapai Visitation Certificate”, and “Photo opportunities with Hualapai members”, which just sounds too painful to contemplate.

If you want to do something as rash as to actually stand on the Skywalk, why, that will cost you another US$29.95 each, and you’ll have to surrender your camera on your way out to the bridge. On the upside, you can buy someone else’s photo of you afterwards, which also sounds too painful to contemplate.

It seemed, frankly, like a rather expensive way of looking at the canyon, particularly when the official National Park, which costs twenty five dollars for an entire car and is otherwise free, was on our way to southern Arizona.

(If you’ve turned up from Google, by the way, you’ll be delighted to learn that there’s a lot of conflicting information regarding the Grand Canyon West. I’ve been as accurate as I can in terms of prices, but you should note that there are apparently child prices for the Grand Canyon West which aren’t on the official website, and that this third-party website has entirely different prices. If you’re willing to part with what either way will be a significant amount of cash, I suggest calling first.)

We drove for another three hours, until it got dark, and stayed the night at the Hill Top motel, which among its various charms (it was open when we got there being its first and most significant), sported an effective heater, free wireless internet, and a deep brown shag carpet of the type American motels seem to have bought in bulk at some point in the mid-seventies and never got around to replacing. Excitingly, it was also on Route 66, the legendary, now largely-defunct, road through the USA.

The next day we visited the Grand Canyon.

I had imagined – and maybe you have as well – that the Grand Canyon would be a kind of huge gorge. You could stand on the top of it and peer down into the Colorado River, but you’d be able to see the other side. It would be a kind of enormous crevice in the surface of the earth.

It is much more.

The Grand Canyon looks as though someone abruptly pulled a huge, irregularly-shaped piece of rock out of the Earth’s surface, leaving behind an extraordinary landscape. You cannot see to the other side of the Grand Canyon from virtually anywhere along its rim: at some places you can’t see to the bottom. The Colorado River – a huge, raging torrent of water – is but a calm thread of tranquil silver below. At various points there are huge peaks, almost as high as the rim, and at others the base of the canyon is flat. It takes three days to hike from the top to the river, and people have died doing it. It is, undoubtedly, the Very Biggest Thing I have ever seen.

It is so big, in fact, that it is virtually impossible to photograph. The best times to catch the light are early in the morning or around sunset, when the sun brings out the reddish rocks properly. It was one of those times, I’m afraid, when you just had to be there.

We spent the afternoon driving along the edge, pulling over at various points to take more pictures and to peer down.

We had intended to camp at the Grand Canyon: one of the finest pieces of small print in America’s National Parks is that you can camp virtually anywhere within them, but a weather forecast in the visitor centre advertised an overnight low of 20 degrees, or minus seven. There are places to stay inside the National Park – great-looking places with towering oak beams, lusciously thick rugs and roaring fires in the reception. Unfortunately they cost upwards of US$200 per night, which was a bit much for a pair who had just recently been contemplating camping. We headed back into Valle, where we found, to our relief, a Motel 8.

Motel 8, and I can say this with all the certainty of a man who has visited two of each, is superior to Motel 6. I’m not sure why the higher number should be the better hotel, but there you are. You get free wireless (at least in both the hotels we stayed in), a free breakfast, and, in the times we’ve gone, the rooms have been nicer and larger, and cheaper to boot.

We stayed in a Motel 8 that night, and awoke to a car park encrusted with frost.

Never mind, we thought. Phoenix would be warm.

Dave quite fancies a week’s camping in the Grand Canyon. Anyone else?