Grand Canyon: Hermit's Rest Road

We took a break from hiking with a bike ride along the western portion of the south rim, following Hermit's Rest Road.

Cope Butte in the foreground, with the Colorado River peeking out behind.

The road is mostly closed to private vehicles, which makes it a good ride--both because it's quieter than the other roads in the park and because biking gives you a unique way of viewing this entire section of the rim. There are various official viewpoints as well as many opportune places along the rim where you can view the canyon and river from different perspectives.

Hermit Rapid is generally considered a class 8 rapid (on a 1-10 scale), although it fluctuates along with the water level.
It's hard to tell from here, but apparently the waves can sometimes reach 20 feet (6 m)!

The point jutting out from the right side of the photo is called "The Alligator".

I mentioned before that many of the features in the canyon are named temples, with various references to Asian and Middle Eastern religions. Here are a few more of them.

In the center is Zoroaster Temple, with the larger Brahma Temple just to the left.

This is the Tower of Ra...

And this is the Tower of Set.

Here you can see the Tower of Ra on the left, then moving right (east), the white-topped Osiris Temple, Horus Temple,
and in the center of the photo, the Tower of Set again. Beneath them you can glimpse the river.

Granite Rapids, another one of the more difficult rapids.

More on flora soon, but here's a sneak peek, with cliffrose (Purshia mexicana) in the foreground.

Here are a couple close ups (relatively) looking into the canyon, rather than all the way across it.

Here you can see the yellow Bright Angel Shale, the Tapeats Sandstone cliffs just beneath it,
and finally the Vishnu Basement Rocks, the lowest layer of the canyon.

Here you can see the aptly named Redwall Limestone above the Bright Angel Shale.

Here's a panorama I stitched together in Photoshop, looking from the left/west/downstream to right/east/upstream. (You can click on the photo to view it larger than shown here.)



Most of the photos I've seen of the Grand Canyon seem to explicitly avoid getting any of the rim or vegetation in the photo. This may make for majestic canyon views, but it also misses an interesting component of the landscape, the way the canyon suddenly falls away from the flat plateau.



The endpoint of the road and ride is Hermit's Rest, another building designed by architect Mary Cotter. The ride was 21 miles round-trip, and mostly not too steep, except for the grueling half a mile with a 6% uphill grade early in the ride. It was both fun and exhausting!