First elk for the trip

Paint by numbers, an elk seen a few meters from the road sign. A magnificent bull was lurking in the background with a rack as impressive as the sign.

Fierce fire and a helicopter over the canyon

A fire started on tuesday at Slide Rock State Park north of Sedona on the famous Oak Canyon Road. It is out of control and burning vast tracks of state forest between Sedona and Flagstaff - the road to the Grand Canyon. Its national news here and quite scary to experience.

The wind kept us grounded on tuesday and the fire nearly did so today. 

We did get to fly over the canyon even though the smoke from the fire was drifting across - over 150km from source.

Thrilling.

Quote from Powell, I am dipping into his seminal book on his expedition through the Grand Canyon:

'The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock, cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock, ten thousand strangely carved forms...cathedral shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly colored.'

…and it is just so, 'a land so strange, so wonderful, and so vast in its features'.