When at El Capitan in Yosemite, the largest cliff face in the world, my geology professor stated that granite was the rock best suited for forming large cliff faces. When I asked him how we knew that, he said, “Because if there were a better one, there’d be a larger cliff face somewhere else made of that other kind of rock, but there isn’t.” For an abstract thinker like myself, this was a surprising answer and as you see I have remembered it to this day. Based on this reasoning, I will say that the middle Colorado River is one of the most forbidding places for bridge construction in the world. I say this because if it were not, the Americans, perhaps the greatest road- and bridge-building culture of all, would have built more roads and bridges over and along it. As it is, the middle Colorado is crossed by two bridges – both near each other – in some 600 miles. The problem, of course, is the Grand Canyon.
Since roads do not cross the Grand Canyon the only approaches are dead ends coming from the major highways. I had to leave the river to meet up with it later. So I took Route 66 east, away from the river, and headed for the Grand Canyon.