Private cars stop at this junction unless they carry a park accessibility permit. Yaki Point and the South Kaibab Trailhead are reached by the eastbound Orange shuttle, on foot, or by bicycle. The road's shape is the product of a 1920s argument over how close a highway should run to the rim, and in fall a raptor count works nearby.
Yaki Point Road is the one turn on this drive that stays closed to private cars. There's no private parking at the point or at the South Kaibab Trailhead without a park accessibility permit. The free Orange shuttle goes there, but catch it on the eastbound side of the visitor center terminal, because the westbound stop takes you the other way. In fall, HawkWatch biologists count raptors near Yaki Point, about eight thousand sightings a season, and you can walk out to watch. Ask a ranger whether the count is running. That side road also holds a clue to why this drive so rarely shows you the canyon. In January of nineteen twenty-four the park's men and the Fred Harvey Company agreed they didn't want a road along the rim. By the end of that year nearly all of them had changed their minds, because an all-weather road couldn't keep following the washes that form a few miles back. Only Horace Albright and Stephen Mather, at the top of the Park Service, still held out. The line that won sat in between, touching the rim only briefly near Yaki Point and a few places to the east. So you get pines, then a turnoff, then the whole canyon waiting at the end of it.
Photo: NPS Photo / Michael Quinn · Public domain