There's a small museum near the Canyon that talks about the lives of the Native Americans who lived here a good while back. There's a tourist trail around the museum where you can learn about the local flora.
The paths are beautiful, bicycles are banned on most of them, you can only go on foot.
On the tourist trail, there are signs with info about all sorts of interesting stuff. We rarely had time to read, plus it was hard for my heavily pregnant sister to stand and walk a lot, so I barely skimmed them.
For the first time in my life, I saw a juniper. (Juniper). There are huge thickets of it near the canyon. It's a useful plant, brings us wonderful cone-berries. You might laugh, but that's what they're actually called. They also extract cedar oil from it, which sounds completely schizophrenic, but it's true too. I didn't doubt it, because in appearance a cedar completely resembles a juniper, just a hundred times larger.
Since we're already at the Canyon, you're going to enjoy its views, nothing you can do about it.
Basically, the view is not too shabby.
There wasn't exactly a shortage of people. But in high season it gets so packed you can't even get through.
For perspective, here is the same rock from some distance away.
There's not a lot of space near the Canyon, plus there's environmental protection to consider, so there's a special Canyon Village for souvenir shops and eateries. The little stones are pretty, I bought some as gifts for folks. Naturally, they stayed in the suitcase.
I decided to sit on the edge too. This is us enjoying the sunset, we drove out here specifically for it. By the way, it seems like all these rocks and the bottom aren't that far away. In reality, in the pictures above, just like in this one too, it's practically a kilometer down to the bottom, and to the opposite wall that you see — it could easily be 10 or more km. Such are the mountains.