Driving Tours

Start: Yavapai Point, about a mile east of Grand Canyon Village.

Finish: Desert View overlook, near the park's east entrance.

Time: About 4 hours.

Highlights: Spectacular views of both the central and northeastern canyon.

Drawbacks: Sometimes closes temporarily in winter due to snow.

Desert View Drive travels 2 miles on the South Entrance Road, which links Tusayan and Grand Canyon Village. The remaining 23 miles are on the stretch of Highway 64 linking the South Entrance Road and the Desert View overlook. An improved road system and new parking lots have enhanced this drive. The Yavapai and Mather overlooks are on the South Entrance Road; the remaining seven stops, including six canyon overlooks, are accessible from Highway 64.

1. Yavapai Observation Station

Yavapai Point features some of the most expansive views both up and down the canyon. A historic observation station here has huge plate glass windows overlooking the central canyon, along with interpretive panels identifying virtually all the major landmarks. It is open daily in summer from 8am to 7pm, 8am to 6pm the rest of the year.

From here you can spot at least five hiking trails. To the west, the Bright Angel Trail can be seen descending to the lush Indian Garden area. The straight white line leaving from this general area and eventually dead-ending is the Plateau Point Trail. Directly below the overlook and to the north, the Tonto Trail wends its way across the blue-green Tonto Platform. Across the Colorado River, find the verdant area at the mouth of Bright Angel Canyon. The North Kaibab Trail passes through this area yards before ending at the river, just below Phantom Ranch. Turning to face east, find the saddle just south of O'Neill Butte. The South Kaibab Trail crosses this saddle.

2. Mather Point

Visitors who see the canyon only once often do it from here. People entering the park from the south generally catch their first glimpse of the canyon in this area, which offers an expansive, 180-degree view. Many of them immediately steer off the highway, sometimes onto the dirt alongside the road, and rush to the overlook. It can be a clamorous place in high season, epitomizing the "industrial tourism" that the late author Edward Abbey so dreaded.

A large visitor center is just a short walk from this overlook. The only automobile parking near the visitor center is at Mather Point, so visitors now park at Mather Point and walk about 5 minutes to the new plaza (free shuttles are available for travelers with disabilities).

3. Yaki Point

Accessible by car in winter (Dec 1-Feb 28), this overlook is one of the best places to see some of the canyon's most notable monuments, including Vishnu Temple, Zoroaster Temple, and Wotans Throne. As erosion and runoff cut side drainages into the land around the larger canyon, pinnacles such as these are sometimes isolated between the drainages. In time, these monuments will erode away altogether, as will more of the rims. The South Kaibab trail head is nearby.

4. Grandview Point

At 7,406 feet, this is one of the highest spots on the South Rim. In the 1890s, it was also one of its busiest. In 1890, one of the canyon's early prospectors, Pete Berry, filed a mining claim on a rich vein of copper on Horseshoe Mesa, visible to the north of the overlook. To remove ore from the mine, Berry built -- and in some cases hung -- a trail to it from Grandview Point. He erected cabins and a dining hall on the mesa, then, as visitors began coming, added a hotel a short distance away from Grandview Point. Built of ponderosa pine logs, the Grand View Hotel flourished in the prerailroad days. To reach the hotel, which for a brief period was considered the best lodging at the canyon, tourists took a grueling all-day stagecoach ride from Flagstaff.

In 1901, however, the Santa Fe Railroad linked Grand Canyon Village and Williams, putting an end, almost immediately, to the Flagstaff-to-Grandview stagecoach run. Once at Grand Canyon Village, few tourists wandered 11 miles east to Grandview Point, and the hotel went out of business in 1908. The mine fared no better. Plagued by high overhead, it shut down shortly after the price of copper crashed in 1907. Only a trace of the foundation remains of the Grand View Hotel, but the historic Grandview Trail is still used by thousands of hikers annually, and debris from the old mine camp still litters Horseshoe Mesa.

5. Moran Point

This point is named for landscape painter Thomas Moran, whose sketches and oil paintings introduced America to the beauty of the canyon in the years before landscape photography. After accompanying Maj. John Wesley Powell on a surveying expedition in 1873, Moran illustrated Powell's book, The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons. Moran's painting, The Chasm of the Colorado, was bought by the U.S. Government and sent to Congress. These and other works helped lure some of the first tourists to the canyon in the 19th century.

Moran Point is the best place from which to view the tilting block of rock known as The Sinking Ship. Standing at the end of the point, look southwest at the rocks level with the rim. The Sinking Ship can be seen beyond the horizontal layers of Coronado Butte (in the foreground). It's part of the Grandview Monocline, a place where rocks have bent in a single fold around a fault line. Looking down the drainage below Coronado Butte, you'll see the red splotches of Hakatai Shale that give Red Canyon its name.

The first white people to see the canyon probably saw it from somewhere on the rim between here and Desert View. In 1540, Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was scouring the Southwest for the mythical Seven Cities of Cíbola, with its equally mythical fortune in gold. After hearing of a great river and settlements north of the Hopi pueblo of Tusayan, he sent a small force led by Garcia Lopez de Cardenas to explore the area. Hopi guides led Cardenas and his men, who began the journey in armor, to the South Rim somewhere near here. Upon seeing the Colorado River, the Spaniards initially estimated it to be 6 feet wide. (It's closer to 200 in this area.) When Cardenas asked how to reach it, the Hopi, who had made pilgrimages to the bottom of the canyon for generations, professed not to know. For 3 days Cardenas's men tried unsuccessfully to descend to the river. In the process they learned what many canyon hikers would later discover: "What appeared to be easy from above was not so, but instead very hard and difficult." They gave up, and no white people returned to the canyon for 200 years.

6. Tusayan Pueblo

By studying the tree rings in the wood at these dwellings, archaeologists determined that parts of this 14-room stone-walled structure were built in 1185 by the Ancestral Puebloans. Among the pueblos that have been excavated near Grand Canyon, Tusayan Pueblo was the most recently occupied. By 1185 most of the Ancestral Puebloans had already left the canyon. For unknown reasons, however, the dwellers of this pueblo stayed on, despite a prolonged drought (also known from tree rings) and despite the nearest year-round water source being up to 7 miles away.

A self-guided tour takes you through this small collapsed pueblo, which includes the stone foundations of two kivas, living areas, and storage rooms, all connected in a U-shaped structure.

This dwelling, like many Ancestral Puebloan abodes in present-day northern Arizona, has a clear view of the San Francisco peaks, including Humphreys Peak, which at 12,633 feet is the highest point in Arizona. These peaks formed when volcanoes boiled up through weak spots in the earth's crust between 1.8 million and 400,000 years ago. The descendants of the Puebloans, the modern Hopi, believe these peaks are home to ancestral spirits known as Kachinas.

Built in 1932, the free Tusayan Museum, open daily 9am to 5pm, celebrates the traditions of the area's indigenous people. Displays in this dimly lit historic building include traditional jewelry, attire, and tools, as well as historic photos. It's worth coming here just to see the 3,000- to 4,000-year-old split-twig figurines, made by members of a hunter-gatherer clan known as the Desert Culture. These mysterious figurines of deer or sheep were found under cairns (piles of stones) in caves inside the canyon. Both the displays and lighting were improved in 2004, making for a more enjoyable visit.

Note: Porta potties are available at Tusayan Pueblo.

7. Lipan Point

With views far down the canyon to the west, Lipan Point is a marvelous place to catch the sunset. It also overlooks the Colorado River where the river makes two sweeping curves. Between those curves, on the opposite bank, Unkar Creek has deposited a large alluvial fan. From A.D. 800 to 1150, the Ancestral Puebloans grew beans and corn in this rich soil. Archaeologists have found many granaries and dwellings in the area -- not to mention evidence of astronomical observations. At least some of the Puebloans migrated to the rim during summer to hunt the abundant game and to farm there. Rangers offer free talks here daily at 3:30pm, with guided walks available year-round.

8. Navajo Point

Like Lipan Point, Navajo Point offers fine views of the Grand Canyon Supergroup, a formation of igneous and sedimentary Precambrian rocks that has eroded altogether in many other parts of the canyon. Long, thin streaks of maroon, gray, and black that tilt at an angle of about 20 degrees layer this formation. They're visible above the river, directly across the canyon. As you look at these rocks, note how the level, brown Tapeats Sandstone, which in other canyon locations sits directly atop the black Vishnu Formation, now rests atop the Supergroup -- hundreds of feet above the schist. Where the Supergroup had not yet eroded away, the Tapeats Sandstone was often deposited atop it, protecting what remained. In still other locations, the Supergroup rocks formed islands in the ancient Tapeats Sea, and no sand -- the raw material for Tapeats Sandstone -- was deposited atop them.

9. Desert View

Here you'll find the Watchtower, a 70-foot-high stone building designed by Mary Colter. Colter modeled it after towers found at ancient pueblos such as Mesa Verde and Hovenweep. Like Colter's other buildings, this one seems to emerge from the earth, the rough stones at its base blending seamlessly with the rim rock.

The Watchtower is connected to a circular observation room fashioned after a Hopi kiva -- a ceremonial room that often adjoined the real pueblo towers. To climb the Watchtower (which is free), you'll first have to pass through this room, currently being used as a gift shop selling Navajo rugs and Native American artifacts. The shop is open daily 8am to 6pm, and the observation deck can be accessed until 5:30pm. The walls inside the Watchtower are decorated with traditional Native American art. Some of the finest work is by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie, whose depiction of the Snake Legend, the story of the first person to have floated down the Colorado River, graces the Watchtower's Hopi Room. At the top is an enclosed observation deck, which at 7,522 feet is the highest point on the South Rim. A new roadway and parking lot have eased accessibility to Desert View.

The rim at Desert View offers spectacular views of the northeast end of the canyon. To the northeast you'll see the cliffs known as the Palisades of the Desert, which form the southeastern wall of Grand Canyon proper. If you follow those cliffs north to a significant rock outcropping, you're looking at Comanche Point. Beyond Comanche Point, you can barely see the gorge carved by the Little Colorado River. In 1956, at the point where the gorge intersects the Grand Canyon, two planes collided and crashed, killing 128 people. Most of the debris was removed from the area around the confluence of the rivers, but a few parts, including a wheel from one of the planes, remain. (None are visible from the rim.)

The flat, mesalike hill to the east is Cedar Mountain. This is one of the few places where the story told by the rocks at Grand Canyon doesn't end with the Kaibab Limestone. Cedar Mountain and Red Butte (a hill just south of Tusayan along Hwy. 64) were both deposited during the Mesozoic Era (245-65 million years ago). They linger, isolated, atop the Kaibab Limestone, remnants of the more than 4,000 feet of Mesozoic deposits that once accumulated in this area. (Sedimentary rock like this is usually deposited when the land is near or below sea level, as the land in this area was for long periods in the past. It erodes when elevated, the way the Grand Canyon is now.) Though nearly all of these layers have eroded off Grand Canyon, they can be seen nearby in the Painted Desert, the Vermilion Cliffs, and at Zion National Park.

This is the last overlook on the Desert View Drive, where there is a general store and barbecue grill. Past Desert View, Highway 64 continues east, roughly paralleling the gorge cut by the Little Colorado River. It leaves the Grand Canyon, which follows a more northerly course upstream of Desert View. About 10 miles above the confluence, the canyon narrows and the walls begin to drop, eventually disappearing below river level at Lees Ferry (68 miles upstream of where the river passes Desert View), where the canyon begins.