Day 6 - Rim Trail to Hermits Rest

The canyon village from along the rim trail

Today we got up around 5:30 AM and were hoping to get breakfast from the lodge around 6:00 AM, but they don’t start serving breakfast till 6:30 AM. This seems a little silly considering the buses start running as early as 5:00 AM and they recommend you be out on the trails early so you can finish up your first hike around 10:00 AM to avoid the heat and sun of the day. We waited for them to start serving breakfast, we both had breakfast burritos which weren’t very warm or very good, this put us heading to the trails at around 7:00 AM. We walked the rim trail from the Bright Angel trailhead to Hopi Point, which is all paved. We took the bus from there to Monument Creek vista and walked to Pima Point, then took the bus the rest of the way to Hermit’s Rest. All told we walked about 5-miles.

Hikers on the Bright Angel trail clearing the first tunnel, they have hike a mile in at this point.

You can see the mule riders on the Bright Angel Trail not even 1/2 way down yet.

It is a lizard on the edge.

We had lunch at Hermit’s Rest before taking the bus all the way back to our starting point at Bright Angel trail head, and walked the rest of the way to our hotel. Once there we relaxed a bit before hopping on a different bus to go to the General Store in Grand Canyon Village to pick up soap to wash our lunch utensils and some Gatorade.

This was us taking it easy today. We have determined that they are right, you should be done hiking by 10:00 AM, we stopped at 11:00 AM at Hermits Rest to eat lunch. It just gets too bright out to comfortably walk/hike long distances. While hiking both Jim and I are wearing sunscreen, hats, and sun shirts to block the UV rays. Our hiking packs do have water bladders in them and we basically drank all the water in them during our hike today.

Tomorrow we are going to attempt to do some astrophotography and get some sunrise photos. This means we will have to be up around 2:00 AM, so an early bedtime tonight.

That bit of blue in the photo is the river at the bottom of the canyon.

Comments

Cobwebs Everywhere

On October 7 th , I did a studio spooky session with Coralinx Cosplay . The central theme of this shoot was a pretty goth girl who had a fondness for spiders and decorating with cobwebs, making it a perfect Halloween session. Note: Cobwebs are defined as abandoned or old spiderwebs that have collected dust. Many cobwebs are the result of comb-footed spider (i.e., black widows) that make irregularly shaped webs. Spiderwebs are active structures built to catch prey. (Source: Western Exterminator Company) For these sessions, I used: Photography Equipment Other Equipment Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Westcott FJ400 2 Phottix Strobes 2 strip boxes 2 rectangular soft boxes 2 c-stands 3 light stands Backdrop stand Black seamless 2 Westcott silicon gels Tether cable Laptop Laptop holder Sandbags A-clamps Spyder Color checker Fake cobwebs Table ...

2025 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2026

This year was a bit interesting especially since during the day, I’m a government employee, which resulted in a lot of stress and a 42-day furlough. I didn’t attend as many cosplay events with the D.C Cosplay group, now Costume and Camera, as I normally would have, due to schedule conflicts. However, I traveled up to Poughkeepsie, New York for two photo events, one of which I was a featured photographer. I attended two conventions, one of which didn’t turn out as expected and the other just confirmed my decision to take a break from it. Though happily I did a lot of studio work this year, which I enjoyed. But on the other hand, I lost my dear “studio supervisor”, my dog Teddy. He liked to great clients and then “supervise” while lying/sleeping in his bed. I also started to work on the business side of my photography work, by investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) site to manage bookings, schedules, and payments. No more trying to juggle...

Katsucon 2025 Wrap - Up

Katsucon 2025 didn’t seem as crowded as 2024, but I still wasn’t feeling it. Katsucon will always have a special place in my heart, but I think I’m just bored with it, from a creative perspective. While I still love working with cosplayers the location itself no longer excites me and I’m tired of fighting the crowds. If I return to Katsucon 2026 I think I’ll just set up a studio in my room and do studio sessions. I can be a lot more creative with a studio session, and I get to use all my lights. So now let's talk about photography. For Katsucon I was shooting with my Canon R6 with an 24-105 Canon RF lens, and I had a fisheye lens on me as well, but we will discuss that later. I had two speedlights, one on camera which acted as a trigger 90-percent of the time and one on a light stand which my husband would hold during shoots. This year I booked 11 cosplay sessions and shot 869 frames. I shot a range of ISOs from ISO 100 to ISO 800...

The Munchkin's Notebook

Search This Blog