I've Bean Travelling

See more from my On This Day series here, where I celebrate travel memories on their trip anniversaries.

On October 21, 2018, I was at the Grand Canyon, Arizona, United States.

We were a few days into our trip to Las Vegas and were ready for a break from the cigarette smoke filled casinos. I did some research and discovered a company called GC Tours that offered day trips to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, so signed us up for an excursion to visit this natural wonder of the world.

The Grand Canyon is located in Nevada’s neighbouring state of Arizona. A six hour drive from the Las Vegas strip took us across the border over to this famous feat of nature, a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River with a depth measuring over 6000 feet, formed over 6 million years of erosion on the upraised earth’s crust. Horizontal strata exposed in the canyon retrace geological history over 2 billion years.

The canyon and adjacent rim are contained within Grand Canyon National Park, the Kaibab National Forest, Grand Canyon-Prashant National Monument, the Hualapai Indian Reservation, the Havasupai Indian Reservation, and the Navajo Nation. For thousands of years, the area has been continuously inhabited by Native Americans, who originally built settlements within the canyon and its many caves. In 1540, García López de Cárdenas from Spain became the first European to view the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon National Park remains one of the world’s premier natural attractions, an awe-inspiring destination to go hiking, rafting, camping, or just to observe a sight among Earth’s greatest geological spectacles.