With all this warm weather this year, I was thinking about the last time I had seen or felt some cooler weather. Tahoe this year had some snow, but not enough for it to feel like winter in Tahoe. So flashback about 18 months to Thanksgiving 2013, I was with Betty’s family on vacation to Thanksgiving. We decided to do a day tour to Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon.

  Everything seemed well at the beginning of our trip. The ride out to Hoover Dam was fine and breakfast was provided. And the view of Hoover Dam was spectacular.

  Then we went to the Grand Canyon. It was another 2 or so hour drive. The weather seemed to be holding up… until we arrived.

That was our view across the canyon. And it wasn’t any better looking down…

  Unfortunately, we experienced something that only happens every 10 years or so. It’s called a temperature inversion. The fog that settles into the canyon over night gets trapped in as the air above it is warmer too quickly. It makes for a cool effect, but there was no way to see anything even a few hundred feet down.

So we ventured out to the overlook to see if we could see anything from there.

Once on the viewing platform, we got a great shot of another viewpoint. It almost looks as if the viewing platform was floating in the clouds. With the Grand Canyon being a bust, the 4 hour ride home was brutal. We managed to get a partial refund on our trip since we basically drove hours to see fog.

Luckily that night, we the water fountains at the Bellagio and the pyrotechnics at the Mirage still worked :).