Grand Canyon National Park
The first time I went to the Grand Canyon, about three years ago, I took many pictures. None of them came out. Every single one was hideously over-exposed, and they all looked like bleached white rocks against an even whiter background. Well, this year I was determined to expose my photos properly. It turns out, though, that the Grand Canyon is actually kind of hard to photograph. The photos all look rather featureless. The canyon is so vast and deep that it is difficult to get any sense of scale in a photograph. One could be looking at a pit mine or some other dull expanse of dirt and rock. This isn’t a commentary on how magnificent the canyon is in person. It is just hard to capture the hugeness of it in a photo.
Naturally, this difficulty did not deter me from trying. I wasted many, many pictures trying to reproduce the breathtaking expanse of the canyon on film (figuratively speaking, film).
And now, I am sharing the fruits of my efforts, lots and lots of mediocre pictures of seemingly uninteresting rocks, with lucky you. If I could make viewing this post mandatory so that each and every visitor to this site had to sit through every single photo, I would. In fact, I would blaze the pictures across social media and forbid anyone to navigate past them until they had endured them all. That is how important I think the Grand Canyon should be to all Americans. So enjoy these pictures, and remember: suffering builds character.
Canyon within a canyon
It just goes on and on…so far it’s hard to see the other side clearly. And the top, the land out of which it is carved, is utterly flat. It is like a reverse mountain range.
Clouds marching over the canyon
Here are some very silly people (IMO) who are ignoring the signs telling people to stay safely behind railings in viewing areas. Instead, they have clambered out upon some of the rocks perched thousands of feet above the canyon floor to take pictures of themselves defying death. Hopefully, they will continue to defy it rather than falling victim to it. To a person such as myself, who cannot stand securely on her own feet in the middle of a parking lot at the bottom of Death Valley, it seems exceptionally foolhardy. My hands are actually sweating in fear as I write this. Most of the pictures I took of the Grand Canyon were taken from a sitting position because raising a camera to my eye is enough to make me lose my balance, and the railings at the Grand Canyon are actually quite low, or, in many cases, non-existent. In this case, though, the people are below one of the main viewing areas near Grand Canyon Village, and they have climbed over the railing to immortalize themselves.