Day 6

Neither Mike nor I realized there might be snow at the Grand Canyon. In fact, we didn't really even know that it snowed in Arizona at all. So on the drive over this morning, from our night's stay in Williams over to the park, we were amazed when the little patches of snow we'd been seeing turned into one big blanket.
As we write this it is lightly snowing with an estimated accumulation of 3-5 inches overnight. In the morning another wave of the storm is supposed to dump another inch or two on top. This being the first snow we've seen this year we're enjoying ourselves, hunkered down in our tent, at the only campground open here. There's a handful of other people camping here we must be as crazy as us, so that's reassuring, and we also have the advantage of having our truck which contains anything we could possibly need.
We're excited to have our first snow-camping experience together and also for the opportunity to test out our cold weather gear that we will be using next month on the trail. So far so good!
Anyway, we got to spend a couple of hours walking around here today and the scale of the canyon is almost incomprehensible.
We are on the South rim and from where we were today the distance to the other side was 8.5 miles. 8.5 miles!!! At it's widest it's something like 18 miles across. It is almost too big for it to even feel like it's real, more like a big fantastic backdrop that gets lowered each morning when the visitors arrive. We're lucky to be able to see the canyon in an unconventional way- during winter. Now back at our tent, snow is falling, and we're looking forward to a possible crazy night of snow and maybe more tomorrow....