Lithl has been offline · 7:12pm Jun 22nd, 2013
I've been basically cut off from the internet since last Sunday. I was able to check my email twice on my phone, but my phone began bugging out as I was boarding the plane and it grew steadily worse from there.
Where was I, that I was cut off so?
The Grand Canyon.
I brought my laptop with me on the trip in the hope that I'd have time to write some more for My Little Exalt (as that does not require me being online), but there didn't turn out to be very much free time, and the time I did have, I was exhausted. So, there's been no story progress since last weekend. (My unread chapter count has also climbed up into the 90s. 
)
So sorry for the delay on MLE!
If you want to see a small selection of my vacation photos, keep scrolling down.
We flew in to Phoenix on Sunday and drove to Sedona to visit my uncle. After staying for a night, we left on Monday. On the way to the Canyon, we stopped at Sunset Crater.
We didn't climb the crater (that'd be a ton of hiking, and we were just stopping along the way to our real destination), but the place was pretty cool. It was a black sand beach without, y'know... being a beach.
We also stopped to check out the Painted Desert. There were several times when the desert looked just like the sky at sunset!
There were a few other places that we checked out on the way to the canyon, and we finally reached our hotel just before 9pm. The dinner buffet was closing, but the restaurant was open for another hour. They had elk! I'd never tried elk, so I got an elk satay appetizer to share, rather than ordering an elk entrée. It was kinda gamey, so I'm glad I didn't have it for dinner. (Elk does NOT taste like venison!) I got a buffalo dish which, surprisingly, tasted a lot like my mother's beef stew. And it was a lot better than the beef stew I'd ordered for lunch on the Indian reservation we passed through.
On Tuesday we walked along the rim of the canyon, and stayed to watch the sunset.
We had to wake up early on Wednesday. At 6am we were boarding a tiny 10-steater Cessna (counting the pilot and copilot chairs). We took a scenic flight over the Grand Canyon, Marble Canyon (contains no marble!) and Glen Canyon (Glen Canyon is north of the Grand Canyon, and it was also carved by the Colordao River).
At the top of Glen Canyon is the Glen Canyon Dam, which dams the Colordao River and creates Lake Powell. Because the water passing through the dam comes from the bottom of the lake, the river on the other side of the dam is cold. The river is about 42 degrees Fahrenheit, and doesn't get much more than a degree warmer for 20 miles or so.
Once we landed in Page, we took a jeep-née-pickup to Antelope Canyon (a slot canyon). There was... a lot of sand. Once we got off the actual roads, the listed speed limit was 25, but the drivers had to go much faster or risk getting stuck in the extremely fine sand, as demonstrated by the two trucks that did get stuck. In several sections of the canyon itself, there was sand pretending to be rainfall -- not a downpour, but a steady drizzle. The people with actual cameras had to be super careful about their mechanical lenses.
A lot of the pictures of Antelope Canyon look like some kind of abstract swirl of colors created in Photoshop, or else they look like false-color photos. It's all real.
After getting back from Antelope Canyon -- we hiked through the Upper Antelope Canyon, about 0.2 miles one way, so it wasn't very strenuous -- we took a bus to the Glen Canyon Dam. We had our bags searched, because apparently Page and the Dam were considered high priority targets during the whole 9/11 stuff, and the government stepped up their security. We drove through a two mile tunnel in near-pitch darkness to reach the bottom of the dam, and then we had to wear hardhats because we were standing directly below Glen Canyon Bridge, and people would often throw things off the edge.
We climbed into large rafts (ours had 18 people) and began our float trip down to Lee's Ferry. The trip was several hours, but very calm; the rapids don't start until you're downriver of Lee's Ferry. The air was hot (there's generally about a 20 degree difference between the bottom of the canyon and the top, and there's very little shade in the middle of the day) and the water was cold (about 42 degrees, as I said). I got a sunburn on my arms, but it was a bunch of fun.
Along the way, we saw some big horn sheep and wild horses. The trip also had a scheduled stop at a beach, with a trail up to some petroglyphs.
We finally returned to our hotel at 6pm. A 12-hour excursion.
Thursday, we returned to my uncle's house in Sedona. Friday I finally got home, at about 11pm.
I see