Lookout Tower Hill

Lookout Tower Hill (9,165ft) – Highpoint of Grand Canyon National Park

Matthew at the tower

Eric and Matthew Gilbertson – October 25, 2015

I had been driving around the southwest for a week hitting national park highpoints and Matthew flew to Las Vegas for a long weekend to join. I picked him up on the evening of October 23 and we camped out in the desert just outside of town.

On October 24 we drove to Zion National park and did an afternoon hike up the Narrows. I can understand why the Narrows is so popular. It’s a fun hike in an extremely deep gorge. You have to wade through the water most of the hike, and it got as deep as our waist in places.

That night we drove around to the north rim of Grand Canyon National Park to camp out. In the morning we started a big 55-mile Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim hike where we jogged down from the North Rim to the Colorado River, hiked up to the South Rim, then jogged back down the the Colorado and hiked back up to the car. It took 18.5 hours from 3:30am to 10pm and earned over 100,000 steps for me on my fitbit. Matthew unfortunately lost his fitbit through a hole in his pocket, so he didn’t officially earn the 100k step badge.

We camped out again that night at the North rim, and in the morning decided to start tagging some park highpoints. The highpoint of Grand Canyon National Park is actually very easy to hike to, much easier than our hike the previous day. We just drove to the north rim entrance station and parked the car on the side of the road. Then we hiked up the short gravel road to the lookout tower. We wandered around the woods a bit searching for an sign of higher ground or a glass jar with a summit register inside, but couldn’t find anything.

After a few minutes we walked back down and started driving to Capitol Reef National Park.