Grand Canyon Desert View Drive: Mather Point to the Watchtower

At the start of the tour

Welcome to Grand Canyon Desert View Drive

Welcome to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. This tour follows the rim road east for twenty-three miles, from the visitor center to the stone Watchtower at Desert View, with six stops at overlooks along the way.

Before we start, the people. Humans have lived in and around this canyon for nearly twelve thousand years, and they have used it ever since. Today, eleven Tribes have historic connections to these lands: the Hopi, the Navajo, the Zuni, the Havasupai, the Hualapai, the Yavapai-Apache, and five bands of Southern Paiute. The park calls the canyon a place of immeasurable importance to Native people in the Southwest. You'll hear some of their history along the way, and the tour ends at a place they help shape.

Here's how this works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each overlook, and another when you get there. In between, I'll stay quiet, so you can enjoy the forest and the light.

Point 1 · At the stop

Grand Canyon Visitor Center and Mather Point

You're at the Grand Canyon Visitor Center, the busy front door of the South Rim. The rim itself is about a five-minute walk away, at a point named for Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service.

In 2010, the park rebuilt this whole area: the parking lots, the plaza around the visitor center, a new amphitheater at the rim, and an overlook with no cars on it at all.

Out at the railing, on a clear day, you can see more than thirty miles to the east and more than sixty miles to the west. Far below, look for stretches of the Colorado River, the trails that lead down toward it, and Phantom Ranch near the bottom.

A few numbers to carry with you. The canyon averages about a mile deep, and it's up to eighteen miles from rim to rim. The South Rim, where you're standing, averages about seven thousand feet. The North Rim, across the way, is about a thousand feet higher.

Theodore Roosevelt protected the canyon as a national monument in 1908, and Congress made it a national park in 1919. Take your time out at the point. Everything else on this tour lies east of here, along the rim.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Pipe Creek Vista

Next, we're heading to Pipe Creek Vista, the first overlook east of the visitor center.

It looks toward a stretch of rim you can't reach by car. Yaki Point, close by, is closed to private vehicles. You can only get there on foot, by bicycle, or on the free Orange Route shuttle from the visitor center. So Pipe Creek Vista is about as close as your own car can take you to that part of the rim.

The vista also sits on the Rim Trail. This stretch is part of the Greenway, a path along the edge that's open to walkers and to bicycles. It's a good place to get away from the crowds at Mather Point, although on busy days its small parking area fills up too.

Point 2 · At the stop

Pipe Creek Vista

This is Pipe Creek Vista. The side canyon stretching away below you is neatly framed by two points of the rim: Mather Point on one side, and Yaki Point on the other.

Look down the shaded walls for patches of dark green. That's a forest of Douglas fir, growing below the rim. In spring and fall, this is a good spot to watch for birds on migration.

Now look at the very top of the walls, the rock you're standing on. It's the youngest layer in the whole canyon, the Kaibab Formation, about two hundred seventy million years old. Every layer beneath it is older than the one above it, all the way down to the oldest rocks near the river. Reading these walls from the top down is reading time backward.

Some of the views here have railings and some don't, so watch your footing near the edge.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Grandview Point

Next, we're heading to Grandview Point, and the story of a man who came here for copper and stayed for the tourists.

Around 1890, a prospector named Pete Berry arrived on this part of the rim with two partners, the brothers Ralph and Niles Cameron. Below the point, on Horseshoe Mesa, they found what the park describes as the purest grade of copper anywhere in the Grand Canyon. They registered the claim as the Last Chance Mine, and to get the ore out, they built a trail down the cliffs. That trail is still there. Today it's called the Grandview Trail.

Then Berry found something that paid better than copper. In 1897, he and his wife, Martha, opened the Grandview Hotel near the point, and advertised it as the only first-class hotel at the Grand Canyon. Getting there was an adventure in itself: an all-day stagecoach ride from Flagstaff that cost twenty dollars, roughly five hundred in today's money.

It didn't last. In 1901, the railroad reached Grand Canyon Village, and visitors could ride the train up from Williams in three hours for less than four dollars. The business followed the tracks. In 1913, Berry sold his land and claims to the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who used them mostly for grazing cattle. The hotel was torn down in 1929, and the park service bought the property in 1941.

Point 3 · At the stop

Grandview Point

This is Grandview Point, at about seven thousand four hundred feet. The park calls the view panoramic, from east to west, and on a clear day you can pick out several bends of the Colorado River far below.

The Grandview Trail leaves the rim right here. It was built in the late eighteen hundreds to serve the mines, and burros and mules carried copper ore up it. It's very steep, and in winter, ice and snow make it treacherous. Down on Horseshoe Mesa, along the trail, debris from the old mining days is still slowly falling apart.

The Grandview Hotel stood near this point. Nothing of it stands here now, but not all of it is gone. When Mary Colter built the Watchtower at Desert View, her carpenters salvaged wood from the old hotel for the ceiling of the tower's entry room. So a piece of Pete Berry's hotel is still overhead, about fifteen miles east of here.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Moran Point

Next, we're heading to Moran Point, named for a painter.

Thomas Moran was a landscape painter from the Hudson River School tradition, and his paintings of the West helped create many of America's national parks. In the early 1870s, he traveled with John Wesley Powell's expeditions through the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau. Out of those trips came a painting called The Chasm of the Colorado. In 1874, Congress bought it for ten thousand dollars, and it became the second of his western landscapes to hang in the United States Capitol.

Don't expect to find his view from the railing, though. Moran combined photographs and memories from several places in the canyon into one tightly packed chasm. He wasn't trying to copy what he saw. In his own words, he placed no value upon literal transcripts from nature.

Nearly half a century later, he was still painting this canyon. A 1920 canvas of his, Grand Canyon of the Colorado, is in the park's own museum collection. And painters still set up at this point today, chasing the same light.

Point 4 · At the stop

Moran Point

This is Moran Point. It's one of the best places on the rim to see all three of the canyon's main groups of rock at once.

Most of the upper walls are flat, layered rock, stacked like the pages of a book. Below those layers, and across the canyon in the walls of the North Rim, look for layers that are tilted. They're part of what geologists call the Grand Canyon Supergroup. The lower part of it was laid down by rivers more than a billion years ago. Tilted layers like these are only visible from a few viewpoints on the rim, and this is one of them. They also hold traces of some of Earth's earliest life, fossils left by single-celled organisms.

Deepest of all, near the river, are the basement rocks: dark schist and pink granite, the oldest rock in the canyon. Far below you, the river cuts through a band of orange shale.

On a quiet day with no wind, stop and listen. You may hear the Colorado River from up here. And if you can, stay a while. The park suggests watching the shadows and the light change through the day. This view never looks quite the same twice.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Navajo Point

Next, we're heading to Navajo Point, the highest overlook on the South Rim. It's also where the park remembers a terrible day in 1956.

On the thirtieth of June, 1956, two airliners, one from Trans World Airlines and one from United, collided in the sky over the Grand Canyon. All one hundred twenty-eight people on the two flights were killed.

The disaster spurred an unprecedented effort to modernize America's airways and make them safer, and it helped lead to today's Federal Aviation Administration. In 2014, the accident site was dedicated as a National Historic Landmark.

At the overlook there's a stone memorial and a plaque for the people who died. It's a reminder that some of what this canyon holds is recent history, within living memory.

Point 5 · At the stop

Navajo Point

This is Navajo Point, at seven thousand four hundred sixty-one feet, the highest viewpoint on the South Rim. Only the top deck of the Watchtower, a short way east, stands a little higher.

From here you get a fine look at the tower itself, wide views back to the west, and a long view north, up the Colorado River. Look closely at the water far below, and you may spot rafts, tiny at this distance.

In the late nineteen thirties, young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps lived in barracks out at this end of the rim and built trails, rock walls, roads and buildings. A park photo shows a crew of them right here at this point, with the Watchtower on the horizon behind them. Most of their wages went home, to help their families through the Great Depression.

Before you leave, take a moment at the memorial stone for the two flights of 1956.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Desert View and the Watchtower

Next, we're heading to Desert View, the end of the tour.

People have been riding out to this point for more than a century. By 1915, visitors could board a Harvey Car in Grand Canyon Village and ride thirty-two miles out here over rough dirt roads, for what was sold as a grand adventure. To serve them, the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway developed this point. The oldest building still standing here went up in 1927, as a place for visitors to rest, eat and look at the canyon.

Point 6 · At the stop

Desert View and the Watchtower

Welcome to Desert View, the easternmost developed area on the South Rim. From the parking area, it's a quarter-mile walk to the rim, past historic buildings: a stone restroom built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1941, and the little 1927 cabin that later became the caretaker's house.

At the edge stands the Watchtower. Mary Colter designed it and supervised its building in 1932. It's seventy feet tall, on a thirty-foot base. She called it a re-creation, not a copy, drawing on ancient towers at places like Mesa Verde. Inside, a steel frame designed by the Santa Fe Railway's bridge builders holds it up, but every stone on the outside was set by hand. She wanted it to look like part of the cliff, so the stones weren't cut or shaped; any tool mark would have shown. Once, while she was away, the masons finished two layers of stone. One stone didn't satisfy her, and she had both layers taken down and rebuilt.

Inside, look up at the ceiling of the entry room: that's the wood from the Grandview Hotel. On the first landing, the Hopi artist Fred Kabotie, from Second Mesa, painted the physical and spiritual origins of his people's life. Higher up, Fred Geary copied ancient rock paintings onto the ceilings. It's eighty-five steps to the top, where on a clear day the view runs well over a hundred miles, across the canyon and out to the Painted Desert.

For years, much of the tower served as a souvenir shop. In 2016 the park rededicated it as a place of inter-tribal cultural heritage, and today it's known as the Desert View Inter-tribal Cultural Heritage Site, developed with the eleven Tribes you heard about at the start. Artists from those Tribes demonstrate their crafts here, and the murals inside were carefully conserved, work finished in 2019.

Below the tower, the Colorado River bends away to the west. Out here, at the end of the rim, the canyon's story is told by the people who have known it longest. The tour is complete. Thank you for riding along with me.

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