The price of gas in Williams ranged from 2.67 a gallon to 3.09 depending on how close you were to the freeway. Considering most places before this were running around 2.49, this was ridiculous.
After reading the tourist brochures and making a few phone calls, I scheduled a 3 hour plane tour of Monument Valley, Lake Powell, Marble Canyon, and the Grand Canyon for noon on Monday and a 50 minute helicopter tour of the canyon for the following day, just because I had never been in a helicopter before and it was on my list of things to do.
Williams is about 55 miles south of the Canyon, its only other distinctions are it is on Route 66, Interstate 40, and the passenger train that goes back and forth to the Canyon starts there. I ate breakfast at a Route 66 diner that was a plastic and chrome shrine to all things 1950 and small town America. After breakfast I discovered there is more than one Route 66 diner in town, how sad.
I then drove up to the tourist trap that surrounds the GC airport, grabbed some snacks and found the check in desk.
It turned out that a family of four had booked the trip and I got the last available seat. Fortunately, they sat together and I got to sit up front with the pilot in a Cesna 270 Turbo painted white and lichen green. The father was sitting right behind me, so my seat was almost all the way forward for the entire flight.
After taking off, flights have to go east a bit before entering the canyon due to noise abatement ordinances. So, your first 10 minutes of flying is over the forest but you can see the rim of to the right some distance away. The canyon itself is utterly amazing and mind boggling. I cant say I had any epiphanies whilst viewing its vastness, but I did keep wondering where all the dirt went. A lot of it is a pretty bright red and should be easy to spot Around the border of where GC becomes Marble Canyon, we then cut cross country for about 25 minutes to reach Monument Valley and Navaho Mountain.
Ill get the pics up on my site sometime this week and let them speak for themselves. I took over three hundred pictures on that flight and was surprised that less than 5% were blurry, even when using the zoom.
Cutting back west, we went along the south edge of Lake Powell and then over the Glen Canyon Dam. Finally, we came back down Marble Canyon then passed over the North Rim of GC and along the Dragons Tail, crossed the rest of the canyon and finished up west of the airport with another 5 minutes or so of forest time before landing.
In all, it was a great flight, the pilot seemed knowledgeable and rattled off information here and there and played music from his mp3 player the rest of the time. He even leaned forward and ran his shoulder harness over the window for me to take pics out of his window when we passed stuff on the left side of the plane.
Three hours of gawking in a cramped position while craning all around to angle the camera was enough for my powder puff self for the day. I drove back to Williams, picked up dinner from Safeway and holed up in the hotel room watching HBO.