The Grand Canyon! We headed back out the Banning Pass and then northeast to Kingman, Arizona. We had lunch and rechecked the weather, which was clear all the way to Las Vegas. Once airborne the first veins of the canyon appeared almost right away, leading us on. The Dragon Corridor was our first route over the canyon. The start of the corridor took us past the Grand Canyon Airport and then over the edge. Seeing the canyon from the ground is awesome. Seeing it from the air is indescribable. You can see every little canyon and have an unparalleled perspective of the surrounding ground drop away into layer after layer that goes down, down, down. You can watch the Colorado River as it winds its way around and through the glowing red rock formations cut out of the earth. Essentially, you can just see so much more. The 45 minutes that we were over the canyon were not nearly enough to soak it all in.

We headed back south, through the Fossil Canyon Corridor, and followed the length of the canyon west into Las Vegas. By this time the sun had set and the lights of Vegas came into view. Class B airspace here we come. It wasn’t nearly as scary as we thought, although we did discover the controllers wanted an absolutely perfect readback. They vectored us directly over the strip, just past the “space needle”, to join a right downwind for runway 12R at the Las Vegas North airport.