Grand Canyon National Park

Grand Canyon National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The Grand Canyon, in northern Arizona, is the most famous natural sight in the United States, and the first thing a visitor has to settle is which part of it to go to, because the places that bear its name are hours apart. The South Rim, the national park's main section, is open all year and receives nine visitors in ten: it lies an hour and a half by road north of Flagstaff, three and a half hours from Phoenix and four and a half from Las Vegas, and a historic steam and diesel railway runs to it daily from the town of Williams. The North Rim, only sixteen kilometres away across the void but 340 kilometres and more than four hours by road, is three hundred metres higher, cooler, forested, far quieter, and open only from mid-May to mid-October; part of it, including its historic lodge, was destroyed by a wildfire in July 2025, and its present state must be checked.

The glass skywalk advertised from Las Vegas is at Grand Canyon West, on the Hualapai reservation, outside the national park altogether, and the blue waterfalls of Havasu belong to the Havasupai tribe and need their own hard-won permit. At the South Rim, an entrance fee per vehicle, valid for a week, gives access to Grand Canyon Village, with its visitor centre, lodges and campgrounds, and to free shuttle buses, which are the only way of reaching many viewpoints for most of the year. Mather, Yavapai and Hopi Points are the classic overlooks, the paved Rim trail joins them for twenty kilometres, and the Desert View drive runs forty kilometres east to a stone watchtower. To go below the rim, the Bright Angel and South Kaibab trails are the maintained routes: a descent of an hour or two and back is within most people's powers, but the river and back in a day is not, and those who want it sleep at Phantom Ranch or the campgrounds, by lottery and permit, or ride the mules. Helicopter and aeroplane flights leave from Tusayan, and rafting trips through the canyon take a week or two.

Visiting Grand Canyon National Park: what you will see

The canyon was made a forest reserve in 1893, a national monument by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, a national park in 1919 and a World Heritage Site in 1979, and the park covers about 4,860 square kilometres. The figures are easily stated and impossible to take in: 446 kilometres long as the river runs, between six and twenty-nine kilometres wide, and up to 1,800 metres deep. It is the work of the Colorado river, which, fed by the snows of the Rockies and armed with sand and boulders, has cut down through the rising Colorado plateau over the last five or six million years, while rain, frost and tributary streams widened the gash into the labyrinth of buttes, temples and side canyons that the viewer sees. In doing so it laid bare one of the most complete records of the earth's history exposed anywhere. The rim is of Kaibab limestone, laid down in a sea 270 million years ago; beneath it, in bands of cream, red, green and brown that can be followed for a hundred kilometres, lie the deposits of deserts, swamps, shores and seas, each with its fossils, down to the Tapeats sandstone, half a billion years old; and below that, in the narrow inner gorge, the black, twisted Vishnu schist, the roots of vanished mountains, 1.8 billion years old.

People have lived in it for twelve thousand years: split-twig figurines of animals four thousand years old have been found in its caves, the ancestral Puebloans farmed the delta of Unkar and built granaries in the cliffs, and eleven tribes, among them the Havasupai, who still live on its floor, the Hualapai, the Navajo and the Hopi, for whom it is the place from which mankind emerged, hold it sacred. The first Europeans, a party of Coronado's soldiers led by Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, reached the rim in 1540, failed to get down to a river which they took for a stream two metres wide, and left, and nobody returned for two centuries. In 1869 John Wesley Powell, a one-armed veteran of the civil war, led ten men in four wooden boats down the unknown river in a voyage of three months, the last great exploration of the continental United States. The Santa Fe railway arrived in 1901 and built the El Tovar hotel on the rim, and the architect Mary Colter designed for it a series of buildings in stone and timber, Hopi House, Hermit's Rest, the Lookout and the Desert View watchtower, that seem to grow from the rock. The difference of altitude gives the park five climatic zones, from the desert of the river, with cacti, rattlesnakes and bighorn sheep, to the spruce and fir forest of the North Rim, the home of the Kaibab squirrel, found nowhere else; elk graze the village lawns, and the California condor, brought back from the edge of extinction and released near by from 1996, is often seen soaring below the viewpoints.

Grand Canyon National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The South Rim is open every day of the year. Spring and autumn, from March to May and September to November, are the best seasons, with mild days, cold nights and manageable crowds; summer, from June to August, is the peak, with queues at the gate, full car parks and, in July and August, spectacular afternoon thunderstorms, while the inner canyon is then dangerously hot, above 40 degrees, and rangers rescue hundreds of walkers every year who went down too far, too late, with too little water.

Winter brings snow on the rim, ice on the upper trails, for which spikes are needed, brilliant clear air and solitude. Sunrise and sunset are the moments when the canyon shows its colour and depth; at midday it is flat. Going down is optional and coming up is compulsory, the climb taking twice as long as the descent. Lodging in the park is reserved a year ahead, and that at Phantom Ranch by lottery fifteen months ahead. Allow two days. Flagstaff, Sedona, the Navajo country and Page, with Antelope Canyon, are all within two and a half hours.