A forty-year dream came true! Grand Canyon National Park
Story of how I finally made THE trip to Grand Canyon National Park
08 April, 2025
~ 7 min read
It was the mid nineteen eighties. I was an eighth-grade student. Through 10th grade, we were taught Geography of various countries and their mountains, rivers, valleys, weather, agriculture and more. A lesson about how the Colorado river in the North American continent carved a deep canyon over millions of years fascinated me. Forty years later, I finally got to see this magnificent place - The Grand Canyon!
Those days, our text books were very basic. Illustrations, if any, were an artist’s line drawing and never a photograph. I used mountains nearby as a frame of reference and my imagination to wonder how this canyon that I was studying about would look like in real life. Remember, this was a period before internet, social media and finger-tip availability of information.
Growing up as a child with limited resources comes with certain benefits. You don’t tend to have high expectations, let alone believing that any expectation may be a possibility one day. Everyday necessities and challenges take higher priority. But that did not stop me from having an aspiration to see The Grand Canyon one day in my life!
Fast forward twenty years to 2004. I was married and our first kid was 3 years old when I came to the United States of America for work. The aspiration to see the Grand Canyon got a bit closer to reality. In fact, visiting it was ‘one’ of the few goals at that time (before eventually going back to India for good). As years went by, I was constantly ‘refining’ the details of the goal. When I visited, I wanted to be able to hike down to the river and I wanted to spend at least a week there hiking many trails.
As my family became more planted in the country setting deep roots, this goal kept simmering but for some reason, I wasn’t making concrete plans to make the trip. Maybe I was getting comfortable that I can visit it anytime preventing me from making the trip sooner. Life was taking over as well.
Fast forward another twenty years to now - year 2025. Our son is all grown up and attending medical school in Phoenix Arizona. We have an apartment close to his university so he can stay and go to school in comfort. We bought him a beautiful 2025 model Toyota Camry (his choice) as well. I tend to visit him every four to six months. I have a place to stay and a car to drive around. Thus, two of the three major components of any travel plans are covered. Flights to Phoenix, if booked early, are relatively cheap as well.
During these years, I have ‘expanded’ my goal to visit ALL National Parks of USA. There are 63 of them as of this writing. As a landscape photographer, this goal gives me a purpose and focus to ‘be’ in some of the best places on earth, and photograph them. State of Arizona has three national parks. I have already visited Saguaro NP in one of the trips to Phoenix in 2024. I made a plan to take two days off (Monday and Tuesday) from work and also ‘work from home’ on the following Wednesday. Essentially, I would have four full days if I flew in on Friday evening. So, I booked the flights accordingly.
Next step is planning the drive, stay etc. Fortunately, my son said he had no classes that Monday and was willing to join me. The south rim of the Grand Canyon (north rim is closed during winters), was about 220 miles and ~4-hour drive from Phoenix. We planned to stay two nights and return back on Monday to Phoenix. I booked a room at the Yavapai Lodge within the park. That way I was hoping to get two sunsets and two sunrises. When I first ‘hoped’ to see the Grand Canyon forty years ago, I never thought I would do so with my son!
Flying into Phoenix around midnight was a breeze. Son picked me up from the airport. Had a good 6 hrs of sleep. We started driving ~1:30pm Saturday, after having a Tuna Salad Sandwich and a latte at the Sprouts Farmer’s market for lunch. The best coffee I had in a long time. He took the wheel for half the distance as I was reading the ‘Photographing American Southwest Volume 2’ book to make a plan on where to go for the sunrise and sunsets and during the day. We could only reach after sunset on Saturday. We checked in to the hotel and had a good dinner at the Yavapai Dining Hall.
Sunrise the following day was going to be at 6:45am. Mather Point, where I wanted to be was less than two miles from our room. After dinner, we drove to the place to check it out so we knew where to go precisely in the morning. We had a good night of sleep. We arrived about 45 minutes before sunrise. The pre-dawn colors have started appearing over the eastern horizon. Temperature was in the low thirties (almost zero Celsius). The rim trail was icy and slippery. We had to tread carefully. There were people already waiting and more were arriving. Mather point is pretty popular for sunrise and is close to the Yavapai lodging. So, crowd was expected.
The time I was waiting for forty years finally arrived. The vista I was imagining as a child slowly started revealing itself in front of me in the glorious lighting of pre-dawn and the sunrise. Words can’t explain the experience. The canyon is almost a mile deep! It is incredible to witness what nature did for over 70 million years. In this context, the period of us human beings on this planet is just a ‘blip’, and we fail to understand it.
As a landscape photographer, I look for what happens on the ‘east facing’ parts of a landscape (I will be facing west) during sunrise. As the sun rises, if you are looking at it directly, i.e., towards east, the foreground starts getting darker. It is a high contrast scene. No camera can do justice capturing such a scene, unless you only care about the colors of the sky. The west facing side on the other hand will glow in the beautiful, mellow early morning light. At Mather point that day, I believe there were about a hundred people. I was the only one with my tripod/camera setup looking west.
Recently, I moved on to the Hasselblad system from Canon. The Grand Canyon was its first outing. Move to medium format has been a thought for a few years and it was finally the right time. So, here I was, after 40 years of wait, with my new Hasselblad system. I had with me three prime lenses and a 100 mega pixel medium format camera. The three lenses were 28mm (22mm full frame equivalent), a 45mm (35mm ffe) and a 90mm (70mm ffe). The system, the lens choices, and the move to medium format is a story in itself. I will write about it another time.
I started looking for the right compositions and shot quite a few photos. After all, I am at THE Grand Canyon!!! I also shot a couple of panoramic sets (a series of images each having some overlap, so they can be stitched together in Photoshop later on). To check the quality of the images, I zoomed in while reviewing them on camera and was pinching myself in awe. How can those relatively tiny lenses produce an image circle fit for a medium format sensor and still produce those crisp 100 mega pixel images? It was surreal for me as a first timer with a medium format. Maybe this was the reason why I ended up waiting so long to visit this magnificent place?
