All photos are links to more pictures at Flickr.

The main goal of our trip West was to see the Grand Canyon. Dziadek, having been a geography teacher, had wanted to see it for as long as he could remember; K and I, not having had a vacation for years (literally), were eager to take him; L really didn’t care.

I first went to the Grand Canyon when I was eleven. During the intervening twenty-some years, I never forgot about how awe-struck I was when I first saw the canyon.

“I knew it was big, but that big?!”

K and Dziadek had similar reactions.

The GC in winter with a baby is a hectic schedule — into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car, into the car, out of the car. Coats on, coats off, coats on, coats off, coats on, coats off, coats on, coats off, coats on.

It soon became clear to K and me that this was just a reconnaissance trip, for we must go back and hike the canyon.

A note to photographers: the rocks reflect a lot of light. We found quickly enough that it was necessary to underexpose most shots by 0.7 steps.

The cliche is that a picture is worth some ridiculous amount of words. That really depends on the author, I’d say, but all that notwithstanding, even pictures don’t do the GC any justice. It’s just enormous on a scale that is incomprehensible.

Two hundred and seventy-seven miles long. An average of ten miles wide, with the shortest trail from rim to rim being twenty-four miles long. Five thousand feet deep.

Six million years old, with the oldest layers of rock being well over a billion years old.

It’s like staring into infinity.