Rain, rain, go away...

It is neat to see rain the dessert, because you can see it from so far away. We saw it several times on our journey to the Skywalk. Did I mention the journey was a two and a half hour journey from Vegas, not all on paved roads? Apparently the Hulapai Indians haven’t actually talked the surrounding county into paving all the roads just yet. The beginning of the trip was uneventful – we passed over the Hoover Dam and stopped to see Rick for a few minutes, then we continued on. Naturally, Susan had the entire route mapped out and we had no trouble finding our way, until the very end. When we got to the road that wasn’t paved all the way, the sign said 21 miles to Grand Canyon West. The first 7 miles were paved, with 14 unpaved. By unpaved I mean a simple dirt road with lots of bumps and ruts where people had traveled through previously. Oh, by the way, it was monsoon season. I’m not kidding – that’s what the call the rainy season in July. Even though it wasn’t raining at the time, we could see several “washes” where the rain flows down from the surrounding mountains. We did NOT want to get stuck in one of those washes! We carefully made it to Grand Canyon West, which is a building with restrooms and ticket counters, a small gift store, and not much else. There were helicopters buzzing all around, taking the Japanese tourists on trips down in and around the canyon. Then there was a bevy of busses, the regular ones taking you to the Skywalk and Guano Point, and the camouflage ones taking you to the “ranch” (no thanks, we’ll pass). So we head into the building to purchase our tickets, and we are told that the Skywalk just closed 15 minutes ago due to bad weather, so we should just purchase the regular package (bus trip and lunch) just in case. Right about now is when we started wondering whether this would be another “Blue Man Group”.

Since we were concerned about the weather, we decided to stay on the bus past the Skywalk stop and head to lunch first. The bus driver had just told us there was a nice lookout point up ahead, so when we see this structure, we’re thinking that must be the lookout point. It certainly didn’t seem like the Skywalk – especially since all the “regular” buses had a painted picture of the Skywalk on the side similar to this: