Originally posted by cdurfor In about a month I will be spending 2 sunrises and 2 sunsets at the south rim of the Canyon. I would appreciate any suggestions for must see (shoot) vistas. Many thanks...
Grand Canyon may be my favorite place on the planet. If I lived in Flagstaff or even Phoenix, I'd be in the Canyon every month.
You said you're going to be "at" the South Rim. My first recommendation—one I make to everybody who's visiting the Canyon—is, don't just stay up on the rim. If you are at the South Rim near the El Tovar Hotel, by all means, walk down into the Canyon via the Bright Angel trail. The further you go, the more you will appreciate the canyon and the more you will see. However, even if you don't have the time (or the energy) to hike down very far, walk in as far as you can go. Even if you only hike in for thirty minutes, you will be grateful that you did.
If you are hoping to get sunrise or sunset photos, look again at the map of the canyon and start some planning. Since the canyon is oriented roughly east-west, and since the main South Rim viewing spot by the El Tovar is looking pretty much due north, you won't want to be THERE for a sunrise especially. If you can drive or take the shuttle all the way east to the Watchtower at Desert View, well, the Watchtower is worth visiting in its own right, but especially because it provides one of the best—indeed one of the very few—clear views eastward in the main part of the national park. Check out the East Rim and Desert View map on this page:
Grand Canyon National Park - Maps (U.S. National Park Service)
Perhaps even better, go to the S Kaibab trail head and hike down the trail. The problem is, you have to hike down a goodish ways before you come out of the side canyon and get a clear view to the east. So you'd have to start down really early and hike a long way in the dark. (It's been more than a year since we hiked down S Kaibab, so my memory here might be a little defective. On our more recent trip, due to the potentially dangerous weather we went down and came back up on the Bright Angel trail.) This photo was taken in 2008 when we hiked down the S Kaibab. This photo was taken about an hour down from the rim—maybe a mile or so down the trail. It doesn't look very far down but there are lots of steep switchbacks at the top of the S Kaibab. Here it's already past 9am and you can see the the sunlight is just touching the top of the rim.
Eventually though the S Kaibab opens out and goes along mountain ridges and I bet you can get a good sunrise shot somewhere along there. But you'll have to work for it! I've gotten up before dawn and tried to take sunrise photos down by the river, and I haven't been very successful. The bottom of the Grand Canyon is simply not the best place in the world to view a sunrise. Try the top of Rocky Mountain National Park instead - or come down to Big Bend National Park, where the sunrise over the desert will take your breath away.
I've always been at the canyon with my wife (that's here in the photo above), and while we do hike a lot, and she's pretty tolerant of my taking photographs, she's not keen on scrambling too far off the trails. SO my goal is usually just to take the best photos I can take personally. The harder trick at the Grand Canyon is to take a shot that hasn't been taken by a million other photographers. Hiking into the canyon even just a mile or two instantly puts you where more than half of the visitors to the canyon never go. And if you're really lucky, you'll have some unusual weather to deal with. Years ago I got lucky when we were camping at the north rim in August and I caught the canyon full of clouds. The more recent photo below was taken just before Christmas 2009, when we hiked down to Phantom Ranch (via Bright Angel Trail) in a cold and very messy snowstorm. This shot was taken just below the rim.
You'll want to think about your gear, by the way. If you are lucky and see a condor, you might want a long lens. I bought my Pentax 18-250 last December with just that possibility in mind. (I've photographed condors before at the canyon.) But this time we didn't see any condors, and I ended up taking nearly all of my photos with my Sigma 10-20. On our hike down, I decided to carry just one body and only 2 lenses, the Sigma 10-20 and the Pentax 70 f/2.4. I never used the Pentax 70 during the several days we were inside the canyon. The Pentax 16-45 f/4 would also be fine, and indeed, the kit 18-55 lens would work, too. And perhaps your vision is different from mine. At the canyon, I just feel the urge to go wide.
Will