Room+15B

Madi and Rachel's page. pd 6. room 15b

The Grand Canyon was not the normal temperature for the day we went. It was 5  °   C for the highest temperature on the 16th of April. The low was -6  °   C.  The first place we visited was the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and we hiked the Kaibab trail.

This is a picture of the map of Kaibab trail and also pictures of the actual trail. We ended up hiking ¾ of a mile down into the Grand Canyon.

 The view before we enter our trail in the canyon. We thought we were going to the bottom, silly us!



Hiking down the Grand Canyon was very beautiful and fun. The trail was multi leveled with rocks surrounding it, so at times it could be very difficult. (We tripped a couple of times… but who didn’t?)

The Grand Canyon is full of fun facts… The Kaibab trail which we hiked was the first free trail to be able to hike in the Grand Canyon. The Colorado River is 277 river miles long. The black part on the rocks is where water has been on the rock. The reason it turns black is because there is iron in the rocks. While walking down the Grand Canyon, you can see with your bare eyes the sediment changing colors as you go down each different level of the canyon. The sediment changes colors because of the environment the rock was created in. Colors go from white to brown to red and everything in between. Total the Grand Canyon is more than 5,000 feet or one mile deep at its highest point.

Grand Canyon visitor view/rim. Here the view was amazing and we could see what seemed like forever in the Grand Canyon. To the left we could see Lake Powell which was named after the leader of the first expedition to ever go through the whole Colorado River, John Wesley Powell. Although we only stopped here for a little while we took tons of pictures. Same as the hike we took earlier the different layers of sediment were very visible. Here the trees grew greener and bigger!

River Trip on the Colorado River/ Glen Canyon At this awesome location we took an inflatable raft down the river. It was freezing on the boat!! We had a tour guide named Frank who told us many things about the Canyon as our Language Arts teacher, Mr. Davi held onto the raft with his fear of being under water. Some things we learned were about the animals and plants. The trees we saw along the river were not native but from Asia! Herrings, a type of bird, live around the river commonly and we saw a total of two! Ducks wade in the water, and fish swam under us. There were many holes in the cliffs and they are from rocks falling down. There was a water fall that was at the monument dry was named Y water fall, for its Y shape in the rock. It ruins whenever it rains. There was a cliff called thumb cliff named once again because of its looks by John Wesley Powell. The walls here are up to 85 feet high, and the water is about 20 feet deep. The dam holds back the water from Lake Powell, and that is where we started, at the dam.

While on the river we took a small stop on a beach where there were petro glyphs, sand, and wildlife. The petro glyphs were very pretty and unique. It was very cool to be looking at something that was made so many years ago. Many flowers, bushes and trees filled the sand. The red rocks matched the scene we had on the river. We took many pictures and had a lot of fun.

 Wupotki National Monument! Next we went to Wupatki National Monument. The actual building we went to was called wukoki which is 800 years old. Indians made the building out of sandstone which breaks off in squares so they did not have to cut it. Erosion toke away many layers of rock but the building is still standing. This building was used to observe the Earth. It had windows that matched the horizon and an observation deck to look at the sky, day and night. Doors were not used to enter the building but ladders going to the top of the building and then another ladder on the other side to come back into the room. Each room had a certain reason or purpose. This building was larger than most Indian building built at the time. We walked around the building and got to go inside to tour the rooms! Not many shrubs filled the land, only rock and ashes from a nearby volcano.



Sunset Crater National Monument
Sunset crater was the last monument we visited on our trip. Black Lava filled the land and became a sea of black, with a lot of bumps! The lava came from the San Francisco Peak, which erupted about 50,000 years ago, and the land is still black! Not all the pine trees have grown back but many have. There was a wind tunnel in the rocks which stores cooled air, and bats. This was formed like a pie. When the lava cooled cool air came out and made a surface like a pie crust. Underneath the crust it stays hot. The lava flowed out to make an ice cave with constant cooled air flowing out. The volcano that erupted was a cinder cone volcano. As we walked around, listened to the tour guide and snapped pictures it was hard to keep our footing with the jagged unsteady rocks, but worth the amazing view of the San Francisco Mountain.