Grandview Point

Right turn for Grandview Point, about six tenths of a mile out to the rim. Give it twenty minutes, there and back. There are vault toilets out there, but no drinking water. In eighteen ninety-seven Pete Berry and his wife Martha opened the two-story Grandview Hotel, and visitors came by stagecoach from Flagstaff to reach it. The Berrys sold it as the only first-class hotel at the Grand Canyon. Copper is what brought Berry here. Out on Horseshoe Mesa, three thousand feet below the rim, he located the Last Chance Mine, and in eighteen ninety-three he built the Grandview Trail down to it. Each mule carried two hundred pounds and made a round trip and a half a day. The ore ran over seventy percent copper and won a prize at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, and the mine still didn't pay. When new methods opened up low-grade ore and the copper market fell, that rich rock stopped being worth the mule. Berry's horses had one more job. In January of nineteen oh two, a ten-horsepower Toledo steam car left Flagstaff, its driver promising the sixty-five miles in under four hours. The crew abandoned it and walked. Berry's four-horse team brought them in, and on the fifth day Grand Canyon Village met its first automobile, towed in on a rope. The Grandview Trail starts at the point. It's very steep, and it turns icy in winter, so talk to a ranger first, and don't try for the river and back in a day. Pulled in? At the highway, turn right, heading west. But first, stand at the point, three thousand feet above that mine, and give that mule a thought.