Room+5B

 Room 5B Annie and Katie!!! :)

Day 1 (4/16/09):

We had to wake up at 5:45 to get on our bus! We were really tired and not at all awake for most of the ride. Finally the six hour bus ride (it felt more like six million) ended and we were at the Grand Canyon!!!! Along the ride we saw a lot of changes in the scenery. It went from dirt and nothingness to grass and trees! It was so cool.

At the Grand Canyon we took a hike on the South Kiabab Trail. Our guide taught us many things about the Grand Canyon. We learned that it was once underwater. That was pretty shocking news. We saw fossilized sea sponges that once used to be under the sea in the walls of the canyon.

Another piece of evidence to prove that the Grand Canyon was once under water was the shells in the walls.

While we were going down the ¾ of a mile trail, we saw three different types of rock. They were limestone, sandstone, and shale. The big cliffs of the canyon were made of sandstone. Sandstone is made of sand, if hadn’t already guessed. These particular pieces of sandstone were made from ancient sand dunes that once used to exist where the Grand Canyon was. The cliffs keep wearing down over time, which causes some of the weird shaping of the canyon. The slopes in the canyon are made of shale. It’s a type of rock that is clay based and easily breakable. It you step on it, you cause a mini-avalanche of shale. Random rocks spread throughout the canyon were made of limestone, which is caused by water buildup.

We also learned that the Grand Canyon sits on the San Andreas Fault line. Without the fault line, the park service wouldn’t have been able to blast out the trail we walked on (they used dynamite) because the cliffs would have been too sheer. The fault causes them to move. Another thing we learned is that at one time, people almost made the Grand Canyon a lake by building a dam to harvest the water of the Colorado River. Thankfully, they decided the bad things about that out weighed the good things.

As we were walking back up the canyon we saw a really cool site: a squirrel! Squirrels may be everyday animals, but Grand Canyon squirrels have a reputation for being especially mean. After a while we were finally able to capture a picture of one of them.  So when our loooooooooong and exhausting hike ended, we viewed the canyon from a special viewpoint where we got some more awesome pictures.  After going to the Grand Canyon visitor center, we had dinner at a lodge there where it snowed on us! Then we drove another hour to our hotel in Page, AZ. It was lights out for us! Day 2 (4/17/09):

We had another EARLY wake up call today (6:15)! With the sun shining outside we were able to clearly see Glen Canyon Dam that we would be visiting that day. Our guide informed us that we were right on the border of Utah, but not quite in the state.

When we got to the dam, we were told that a government worker would come on the bus and tell us that no weapons were allowed on the bus ride to get to the dam. After that, we boarded a government owned bus and went down a tunnel going through Glenn Canyon. It was about a mile long, and sometimes we’d see out through holes in the walls that they used to blow out the tunnel. We when got off the bus to board the boats, they gave us hard hats just incase a pebble cam tumbling down and hit our heads, even if the pebble could of penetrated the hat.



When we got on our boats, our tour guide started talking about Glenn Canyon and the different types of animals and plants that live there, like the invasive Asian tree that was on the banks of the river. We saw a snowy egret, some hawks, and ducks too. We saw a little rapid, but we didn’t go through it. Later we saw some fishermen go through the rapid, which was dangerous because there were some rocks that they could’ve hit



After a while, the walls got taller and wildlife got scarcer. We could see the different layers of stone in the canyon walls. We stopped for a bathroom break and lemonade at a beach, where we also saw some Petroglyphs. Petroglyphs are ancient carvings in the rock from Native Americans. We didn’t see any pictographs, which are like Petroglyphs except painted on instead of carved. After we left the beach, our guide showed us some pictures that he took of Petroglyphs and pictographs. There was one picture that had figures that looked like little angels with wings too!



Shortly before we got off the boat, we passed a place called Echo Peak, where your echo can be heard from miles around. Just below Echo Peak was a giant sand dune. The dune looked like something out of the Arabian Desert. <span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 255); font-family: Georgia,serif;"><span style="font-family: 'Georgia','serif';">When<span style="color: rgb(0, 172, 255); font-family: Georgia,serif;"> we got off the boat, at Lees Ferry, we left and started to head off to Wupatki National Ruins. We didn’t actually go <span style="color: rgb(0, 165, 255); font-family: Georgia,serif;">to Wupatki since there were some other schools there, but we went to a ruin called  <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif';"><span style="color: rgb(0, 165, 255); font-family: Georgia,serif;">Wukoki. On our way down the small road there, we saw an amazing sight called the Painted Desert. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Georgia','serif';"><span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 255); font-family: Georgia,serif;">We actually got to walk around in Wukoki, and look at all of the rooms and windows. Archeologists think that Wukoki was used as an observatory, because of a window that lines up with the sun everyday. Archeologists also think that Wukoki used to be called Wupatki because Wukoki means “big house” in the ancient language of the Indians.



The holes in the walls that should have been used as doors were really small, so archeologists think that the Native Americans that lived there used ladders to climb through the ceilings into the house.



The last stop on our fantastic trip was Sunset Crater. Sunset Crater is a cinder cone volcano that is dormant (it’s not going to explode anytime soon). We took a short hike on the lava fields surrounding the volcano because we couldn’t actually go up to see the crater at the top of the volcano since the volcano is made entirely of volcanic ash. Which means if we had tried to hike up the volcano to see Sunset Crater at the top, we would’ve just slid back down and probably caused a lot of ash to come with us. <span style="font-family: 'Georgia','serif';"><span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 255); font-family: Georgia,serif;">Along our hike, we saw lots of volcanic rock.



The coolest part of our hike was when we saw a lava tube (the tubes that channel lava in and out of the earth) that turned into an ice cave when the lava stopped flowing. A colony of bats now lives inside the deserted tube. Some people say that it is Superman’s layer because of the ice inside of it.



At the end of our hike, our tour guide pointed out another volcano near Sunset Crater in the San Francisco Peaks. Like Sunset Crater, the volcano is going extinct. But if it did ever erupt again, it would change Arizona’s agriculture entirely because everything would be covered in a layer of ash. Geologists think you’d be able to see the glow of the lava shooting out of the volcano all the way from Phoenix, which is about four hours away from Flagstaff, where the volcanoes are located. <span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 255); font-family: Georgia,serif;"> That was the final adventure on our journey. We had another long drive back to Tucson, only stopping along the way for dinner. We learned tons of new and interesting things on this journey, and we hope you learned a lot too.