When you visit Las Vegas, a trip to Grand Canyon is just an excursion of your Vegas’s trip. You can even take a tour from Las Vegas to the West Rim of Grand Canyon. I wanted to hike and see more of Grand Canyon National Park, so four of us decided to rent the car and drove from Las Vegas to the South Rim of Grand Canyon. It was about four hour drive.

Hiking in Grand Canyon during the summer can be inherently dangerous especially if you hike between 10 AM to 4 PM due to the heat and high temperature that potentially can cause heatstroke, heat exhaustion, hypothermia and hyponatremia.  If you are planning to hike in Grand Canyon during the summer month, wait for the shade and hike after 4 PM or before 10 AM.

We arrived at the South Rim around 2 PM when the temperature was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in July. South rim has nice facilities, so we killed our time in visitor center  by browsing the gift store. Decided to play safe, we waited till after 4 PM to begin our hike on the rim trail. The rim trail is an easy hike but it is quite long. The entire rim trail  is about 12 miles. It follows the rim and offers the most amazing viewpoints. The twelve miles hike can seem daunting. In reality you can shorten the hike just by taking a free shuttle bus. There is free shuttle bus within the park that operate in and around South Rim and stop at each view point. So when we reached the view point, half of the time, we just hopped into the free shuttle bus to take us to the next view point.

If the outstanding view of South Rim is not enough for you, you can always hop onto trans-canyon shuttle and jump into the North Rim.