Picture of the Day - Sunrise in the Grand Canyon

Back in November of 2007, we spent our first night ever in the State of Arizona in the city of Williams, about 60 miles due south of the south Rim of the Grand Canyon. We got up before dawn and drove to the canyon. As a tourist, I was really looking forward to seeing it. But, as a photographer, I was not all that excited.

You see, the Grand Canyon is huge and usually photographs of huge places are not all that exciting for a photographer. Now, going down into the Grand Canyon would be a photographer's dream, but these old legs are not good enough to carry me down and back up again and we didn't have time for a burro trip. So I contented myself with the best photo opportunities I could find.

Mostly, I focused on near objects like trees and rock formations and let the Grand Canyon itself be my backdrop. I did get some nice pictures that I like, this being one of them. What was interesting was that we arrived before the sun broke the horizon and I actually got some good pictures with some very slow shutter speeds (without a tripod). The lens I used with my Nikon camera has an anti-shake technology that worked extremely well. But,as you can tell in this picture, the sun is definitely up...but not very far.

You will notice what looks like haze down in the canyon itself. There was quite a bit more of it in other areas. I thought it might have been smoke from the previous night's campfires. Actually, it was industrial smog. In fact, off to the west, the smog was so thick you couldn't see much of the canyon. It reminded me of some of the worse smog days in L.A. in the 60's and 70's. And, by the way, it isn't from auto emissions, but rather industrial haze from places like copper smelters.

The most interesting fact I learned from a ranger lecture at park headquarters was about the age of the canyon. Someone asked how far down the canyon would we find the strata of the age of the dinosaurs. In fact, the ranger replied, the layers of earth where the dinosaur bones would have been found was actually quite a bit above where we were standing...and we were on the rim. The top of the Grand Canyon is eroding away, as is the bottom where the Colorado River flows through it.