At the beginning of our road trip, as we wanted to go to the area of Page city the day after, we decided to drive to the south rim of Great Canyon National Park instead of the west or north parts of this giant canyon. In an afternoon and the morning of the following day, we had time to go to nearly all the view points of the South rim, with our car or with the park shuttles.
Grand Canyon National Park was named as an official national park in 1919, but the landmark had been well known to Americans for over thirty years prior.

In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the site and said: "The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison—beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world... Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see."

Despite Roosevelt's enthusiasm and his strong interest in preserving land for public use, the Grand Canyon was not immediately designated a national park. The first bill to create Grand Canyon National Park was introduced in 1882 by then-Senator Benjamin Harrison, which would have made Grand Canyon National Park the nation's second, after Yellowstone National Park. Harrison unsuccessfully reintroduced his bill in 1883 and 1886; after his election to the presidency, he established the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve in 1893.

Theodore Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon Game Preserve by proclamation in 1906 and Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908. Further Senate bills to establish the site as a national park were introduced and defeated in 1910 and 1911, before the Grand Canyon National Park Act was finally signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919. The National Park Service, established in 1916, assumed administration of the park.

The creation of the park was an early success of the conservation movement. Its national park status may have helped thwart proposals to dam the Colorado River within its boundaries. (Later, the Glen Canyon Dam would be built upriver.) In 1975, the former Marble Canyon National Monument, which followed the Colorado River northeast from the Grand Canyon to Lee's Ferry, was made part of Grand Canyon National Park. In 1979, UNESCO declared the park a World Heritage Site.

The Grand Canyon, including its extensive system of tributary canyons, is valued for its combination of size, depth, and exposed layers of colorful rocks dating back to Precambrian times. The canyon itself was created by the incision of the Colorado River and its tributaries after the Colorado Plateau was uplifted, causing the Colorado River system to develop along its present path.

The primary public areas of the park are the North and South Rims of the Grand Canyon itself. The rest of the park is extremely rugged and remote, although many places are accessible by pack trail and backcountry roads. Only the Navajo Bridge near Page connects the rims by road in Arizona; this journey can take around five hours by car. Otherwise, the two rims of the Canyon are connected via Boulder City, Nevada, and the Hoover Dam.

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Between the 13th of May and the 3rd of June 2013 we spent 3 wonderful weeks in the west part of USA. It was our first trip in this part of USA, and each day was full of surprises, with countless breathtaking landscapes.

After 3 days in San Francisco, Sausalito, and on the north coast, we made a flight to Las Vegas, to began our long road trip (3.000 miles i.e. 4.800 km and more than 70 hours driving on the wonderful scenic roads from one park to another). We had the pleasure to discover the following sites :

- Grand Canyon National Park, (the south rim part only)
- the Colorado canyon at Lees Ferry, and the Vermillion Cliffs on the road to Cliff Dwellers and Page
- the area of the city of Page (with the visit of the 2 Antelope Canyons Navajo Tribal Parks, the Lake Powell, and Horseshoe Bend),
- Monument valley NP (with an afternoon spent in the Mystery Valley trails with a Navajo guide driving a Jeep Wrangler)
- Arches NP
- Canyonlands NP
- Bryce canyon NP
- Zion NP
- Death Valley NP
- Bodie State Historic Park (the most famous ghost town in the USA)
- Yosemite NP and Maropisa Grove NP near Wawona
- the Napa valley with a visit of the Newton winery (LVMH group)
- early in the morning we also did a balloon flight over the vineyards
- and we stayed 2 mores days in San Francisco before leaving this great city to go back to France.

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