Yaki Point Sunset
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May 21, 26, 2008
There were some grey clouds and a light rain on my second day at the canyon. These photos from that day are from the rim just east of the village.
Here’s a clear view of the battleship formation, with the green strip of cottonwoods near Indian Garden directly below it.
A similar image, this time clear out to Plateau Point
This and all of the following photos are from Yaki Point on May 26.
Some one hundred years ago, before the first bridge was built across the Colorado River at the base of the canyon, there was a hanging cable car across its width to ferry tourists over the river. The trouble with this method is that there was no way for the mules to get across, so when tourists descended from the south rim they had to coordinate with the north rim in order to have mules waiting for them on the north side of the river.
In these days there was no effective modern communication – the trans-canyon telephone line wasn’t built until 1934 by the CCC – so the tourist operation on the south rim built daily signal fires at Yaki Point to notify their associates on the north rim of how many mules they were take down to the river – one fire for each mule.
That farthest bump on the horizon is the 8,029 foot Mount Trumbull, way out in the remote northwest corner of Arizona – it’s a 50 mile trip to that mountain from the nearest paved road. As viewed here from Yaki Point at The Grand Canyon, it’s about 40 miles as the raven flies.
