Las Vegas; Sunday, 09 April, 2023

A 5am alarm call isn’t something that you usually want when you’re on holiday, but it was necessary for todays tour to the Grand Canyon the Western end of which is close to Las Vegas, but American standards of close – so still a 2.5 hour drive to reach the entrance!

After a 6am pickup in the coach we headed to a small restaurant in the suburbs of Las Vegas for an included breakfast and then started the long haul across state lines into Arizona and onto the Canyon. Normally the tour on the way out makes an additional stop at the Hoover Dam to take in the engineering masterpiece on the Nevada/Arizona border, but due to the Spring Break and expected numbers the decision had been taken to swap the stopping points around and head straight to the Canyon in the morning.

This turned out to be an excellent move by the tour company as we arrived at Grand Canyon West just as the site was opening and were amongst the first customers entering the park – by the time we left in the afternoon the car park which had been deserted when we arrived was full with cars backing up down the access road.

As we were on an organised tour we were able to stay on our coach rather than using the shuttle buses provided by the site so we were soon over at our first stop of the trip at Eagle Point, located around 4,000 ft above the canyon floor and with stunning views across the canyon and the rock structures that make this such an iconic natural feature.

Next to Eagle point there is a glass viewing platform that many of the people on the tour had paid the extra $30 or so to visit, but given you aren’t allowed to take anything – including cameras and phones – onto the viewing platform it felt like a bit of a waste of money so I didn’t bother and along with a couple of other people off the tour I had the whole area to myself for a good 10 minutes before the first shuttle bus of passengers from the regular entrance turned up. At this point I headed over to the small exhibition on different types of structures that the local Native American tribes build in the area both from wood and stone, before heading back to the bus to move onto our second stop.

Second stop of the tour was Guano Point – so named for the large cave on the opposite side of the Canyon which was home to vast numbers of bats. It was assumed that they must have created vast quantities of guano which could be mined for fertiliser and chemicals for ammunition so a whole mining operation, complete with a cableway across the Canyon from the Cave to Guano Point was built. It turned out that the bats were clearly constipated as there was barely 10% of the estimated volume of guano on the caves and consequently the whole site was eventually abandoned after massive losses, but today it is a great place to get views down into the canyon and the Colorado River some 4,000ft below.

It's also home to the only catering facilities in the park so this was our lunch stop for our included meal, which we took in the picnic area early enough in the day to enjoy the sun before the heat really started to build.

After Guano Point we hopped back on the bus and started the drive back towards Las Vegas, stopping off on the way back to Hoover Dam to take in the views of this spectacular piece of engineering, but also testament to climate change in the area with the high water mark of where Lake Mead, that the dam formed, used to fill up to until the early 1980s when it started to drop.

From the Hoover Dam it was a relatively quick 40 minute drive back into Las Vegas to be dropped off back at the hotel where I quickly freshened up before heading out for an early dinner, and then a well deserved early night.