Grandy Canyon - 10 months during 1993
After Yellowstone National Park I went back to Michigan and finished my last semester of university. After being unable to find work in Michigan, I found a job working at the Grand Canyon. I ended up living there for 10 months. Much like Yellowstone, I made minimum wage, had very few expenses, and my housing was almost free. The differences between Yellowstone and Grand Canyon were that more Yellowstone workers were university students. Alot of people in the Grand Canyon had been there longer, mainly because its a year-round park. Yellowstone was mostly busy in the summertime, and then a few employees in the Wintertime for snowmobiling. But the rest of the time, Yellowstone had significantly few employees. The Grand Canyon however had a pretty similar amount of people all of the time.
I lived on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. If anyone is interested in working at the Grand Canyon, they can write "Grand Canyon Lodges", "Human Resources", at Grand Canyon, Arizona and it'll probably get there. Working here was quite spectacular, although significantly fewer places to go than working at Yellowstone. Pretty much it consisted of going down either the Kaibab Trail or the the Bright Angel Trail, and then coming back up. However, there were alot of great view all along the canyon to just view sunsets and sunrises. One of the more spectacular things was the changing of colors of the Canyon. Sometimes it was reddish, sometimes greenish, sometimes brownish. Every picture had different hues, and throughout the day, the way the sun hit the canyon, it would constantly change. This is also reflected in the postcards if you were to see a few.
Some employees worked at "Phantom Ranch". Well, only around 10 or 15. I wasn't one of them. "Phantom Ranch" is at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. There are some employees down there, but they must commit to being down there for one year. They generally worked 10 days in a row, and then had 4 days off, which was enough for them to hike out of the Canyon, see the real world again for a few days, and then hike back down to go back to work. They were an interesting crew, but at the time I was only 23 and couldn't imagine committing a year in such serenity at that age. I did end up spending 10 months up on the South Rim overlooking the Canyon, but it was equally isolating, so i guess it didn't make a difference.
Okay, my work at the Grand Canyon, was about 10 months total, but my first 5 months was at the Switchboard. The switchboard was exhausting. All day long people were trying to make reservations for the hotels on the South Rim. Apparently the rooms were booked for a year in advance. The reservations staff would hold some rooms for last minute emergencies though, because multitudes of people would show up at the Grand Canyon looking for hotels in the middle of the night and everything else you can imagine. All day long I had to tell people they had only reached the switchboard, and I'll try to get them into the Reservations Department. The Resevervations Department was so busy that usually all the could say is all hotels are booked for the next year. Unfortunately, they didn't have that many people working at the Reservations Department because of the fact that they rooms were all booked, which meant hardly anyone could ever get through on the phone. My job was to tell them they'd only reached the Switchboard, I can connect you if you need to reach an employee or guest, but I can't book a room. I must have said that around 50 million times a day.
Fortuntely, after 5 months of that, I got into the Computer Room. This job was significantly better, as anything was better than working at the Switchboard. Basically though I just ran off reports and backed up computer harddrives from the system. It was okay.
The closest town to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon was 5 miles away in Tusayan. However this town was basically McDonalds plus around 7-8 hotels. The next biggest town was Flagstaff, approximately 90 miles to the south of the Grand Canyon. This town was kind of a small college town with a few good used CD stores and a few good used bookstores. All in all, Flagstaff was kind of cool, and filled with transients and extremely cheap hotels for the enormous amount of visitors unable to book at rim at the Canyon itself.
About five hours away from the Grand Canyon, lied two fairly large cities - Phoenix to the south, and Las Vegas to the west. About once a month, we'd drive the 10-hour roundtrip just to get away from the small town life of the Grand Canyon and to sightsee ourselves. Generally we decided Las Vegas was the more interesting of the two towns.
I made some pretty good friends here, it was a quiet life, not much happening, a little boring, but overall not too bad. Ultimately I made a good friend for life and I met a longterm girlfriend. Both of which you'll meet yourself if you continue to see where I go after my time in the Grand Canyon.
You can email me at:
Wintermoon2@yahoo.com