May 20, 2012 Ring-of-Fire Solar Eclipse | Photos from the Grand Canyon
If you follow us on Twitter, you know we’re behind on the blog. We’re not currently in Texas — we’re in canyon country. And when we heard about tonight’s solar eclipse, we headed over to the biggest, most famous canyon around, the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, so did everybody else in the quad-state area. We’ve retreated to isolated Cape Royal (assuming that Bright Angel Point would only get worse as the day wore on because it’s right next to the lodge and campground) and found a bit of intermittent solitude. For a while we were in a spot that got mobbed by a team of teenagers. Then there was the gent berating his wife because she didn’t empty the memory card. Now we’ve got a group of annoying geriatric travelers nearby we get to listen to. Overheard: “When was the last time you rode an elephant??” Then: “I always thought crows were the little ones and ravens were the big ones.”
We’ll be taking a bunch of pictures as the moon slides in front of the sun. We’ll update this post hopefully later tonight assuming the internets hold. Fingers are crossed.
If you like the pics, please retweet and share them on Facebook.
Update: As I’m writing this, some douchebag has set up his tripod right in front of us. I may push it over the edge.
More to come.
— UPDATE 5/21 —
You know how sometimes a friend will offer you a bagel, and you get all excited thinking about the hole-in-the-middle, chewy goodness of a good bagel. Maybe it’ll have poppy seeds and scallion cream cheese. Yum! Then you get the bagel, and it’s this bulbous, bready thing that has more of a dimple than a hole and tastes like Wonder Bread flecked with blueberries smothered under honey-walnut cream cheese or something else revolting? That’s what the eclipse was like. Not what we had in mind.
I was dreaming of getting this photo of a disk-of-a-sun hovering on the edge of the Grand Canyon, eerily casting an orange glow over the jagged rocks below. Didn’t happen. Only Lisa was able to get a pic that showed the eclipse — zoomed in as much as possible, shutter flicking as fast as possible, aperture set as small as possible. The pictures are cool (but the dark sky they capture is nowhere near reality … and you’ll have to imagine the Grand Canyon stretched out majestically below). The experience wasn’t what we were expecting. I mean, the sun barely got darker. It was moderately dimmer, at best, and if we hadn’t heard of the eclipse, I’m sure we wouldn’t have even noticed it.
The Navajos supposedly did nothing during the eclipse — no work, no talking, no activity at all. The eclipse is sort of a bad thing and doing stuff during it brings bad vibes to the individual. Maybe that’s the way we should have spent it instead of trying to stretch our 3G across the canyon, teasing out the faintest of signals, thinking we’d get a good photo. Still a fun day, though, after we eluded a couple mobs and found our own spot on the rim away from the chatting and tripoded masses. Could have been worse.
