After making my caches yesterday, I headed back to start a new section of the trail just south of the entrance to the Grand Canyon and rode south for 22 miles. We got a pretty late start but made good time. At the beginning of our day we obviously rode under some sort of helicopter highway because we had a low flying helicopter pass over us about every 90 seconds for about a mile. The horses weren't too impressed with that. It seemed to be more how low and fast they were flying (and coming head on at us) that unnerved Shyla and Takoda rather than just how loud they were. Shyla isn't a fan of riding along busy roads for the same reason; she doesn't enjoy having large moving objects coming directly at her. That's definitely why, aside from the most obvious being it's more scenic, that I try to stick to riding trails rather than roads, which is where many long riders go simply due to the lack of trails at times. In the afternoon we even spotted our first pronghorn antelope! Couldn't get close enough for a picture but it definitely had an interesting gait that I hadn't seen before. Despite our late start we we got to camp just after sunset, and looking back we could even see the south rim of the Canyon just before we stopped for the night.

#2017AZT