Things to do
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Grand Canyon National Park
Four hundred and fifty kilometres of the Colorado River run through the park, in a gorge nearly thirty kilometres wide at its broadest and well over a kilometre deep. The South Rim holds the services and stays open all year; the North Rim is higher, colder and shut through winter. Rim to rim on foot is a two-day undertaking, and the inner canyon can be brutally hot in summer.
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Bright Angel Trail
Switchbacks drop from the village into the gorge on an old Havasupai route, passing rest houses with water in the warm months and reaching the cottonwoods of Havasupai Gardens after roughly seven kilometres. Going down is the easy half. Rangers advise against attempting the river and back in a day. Shade disappears by late morning, and mule trains have right of way.
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Desert View Watchtower
Mary Colter built this twenty-one metre stone tower in 1932 at the park's eastern edge, modelling it on Ancestral Puebloan towers and lining the interior with Hopi murals by Fred Kabotie. A spiral stair climbs to windows looking on the river's bend toward the Painted Desert. It stands some forty kilometres east of the village along a road of quieter viewpoints.
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Mather Point
Most first views of the canyon happen here, on a railed spur of rock a short walk from the main visitor centre, where the rim opens on the inner gorge and the buttes east of it. The car parks are large and still fill by mid-morning. Sunrise crowds gather at the rail; the paved rim trail leads away from them in either direction.
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Yavapai Point
A glass-walled geology museum stands on the rim here, with labelled panoramas that name each formation and a window onto one of the few stretches of the Colorado visible from the South Rim. Sunset draws a crowd to the railing. The rim trail reaches it on foot from the visitor centre in about twenty minutes, level and paved the whole way.
