#2 and #11 - CHECK!

Marking off two more bad boys from this never ending list!!  Number 2 on my list of 101 things to do in 1,001 days was to go to the Grand Canyon.  Big fat check on that!  I’ll do a separate post on the entire trip, but Justin and I have some friends that got married in Las Vegas last weekend.  We decided to go a few days early to hike the Grand Canyon and we invited our favorite hiker friends, Bonnie and Andrew, to join.  We were also joined by another friend Rob and one of his friends. 

Bonnie, Andrew, Rob, Courtney and myself all headed to Phoenix on Wednesday night, but Justin was already there.  He flew out early Tuesday morning and drove to the Grand Canyon for a “rim to rim to rim” run all day Wednesday while the rest of us were traveling.  Justin ran a total of 45 miles.  He went from one rim, down into the canyon to the river, up the other rim and then back, hence the name “rim to rim to rim”.  It’s not even suggested to hike to the bottom, where the Colorado river is, and back in a day, but Justin did it, twice, within 18 hours.  He’s a rockstar.

Anyway, back to the pictures, which is all anyone wants to see anyway:

We took a lot more than just three pictures, but I won’t put them all on this post since this is really just marking stuff off the 101 list.  I’ll do a separate Grand Canyon post later when I have a little more time.

Number 11 on the list was to see a Big Horn Sheep up close and personal.  See, Justin and I along with our hiking buddies Bonnie and Andrew went to Colorado back in 2008 to climb Mount Elbert, Colorado’s highest peak.  While there, we went for a day drive through Rocky Mountain National Park (an absolute MUST at some point in your life-see my post on that here).  While driving through the park, we noticed a trail where we were guaranteed to see Big Horn Sheep.  We were so excited.  Except that the trail was closed.  It was a new trail and hadn’t opened yet.  It was literally going to open the next day.  We were so upset.  So anyway, we never saw any Big Horn Sheep.

While driving from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon, we noticed some signs for this place called Bearizona.  It was a place where you could drive you car through a “zoo” of some sort and all the animals would be right outside your windows.  Guess what their biggest attractions were?  Bear and Big Horn Sheep.  Since the four of us never saw them in Colorado, we had to go to this Bearizona place.  Which is where we saw these guys:

Mission accomplished.