Enchanting the Desert
Photo 5: "Down Granite Gorge, from Grand View Trail," 1899.
The crimson territories in the map below represent what is visible in the photograph.
This station point is accessed by descending Grandview Trail, the trailhead for which is 12 miles east of Grand Canyon Village. The photo was not taken from the trail itself, but from about a mile north of the trail, on the edge of the Granite Gorge. Trail access to this area of the Canyon, known as the Tonto Terrace near Horseshoe Mesa, was developed in the 1890s by copper miner Pete Berry. Until 1905 when the El Tovar Hotel was built at Grand Canyon Village, the head of the Grandview Trail was the terminus for a tourist coach from Flagstaff, making it the early destination as tourism in this region was developing. When Peabody made this image in 1899 he would have been surrounded by tourists on the rim, and likely would have had access to guides who could have shown him this view from deep within the Canyon.