Transportation Facilities at El Tovar. Travelers who visit the Grand Canyon will be pleased to find an up-to-date livery service maintained in connection with El Tovar Hotel and Bright Angel Camp. They are thus able easily and comfortably to take pleasant sightseeing tours away from the hotel to obtain different views of the Canyon. Most visitors here do not realize that the granite gorge district of Grand Canyon alone is about seventy miles in length, ranging from ten to fifteen miles in width, and that from every accessible point along the rim a different outlook may be had, each unsurpassed of its kind. The transportation department is only one of the many pleasing details provided for the comfort of those who come to the Grand Canyon. It is thoroughly organized and equipped.
Trips to Take. At both El Tovar and Bright Angel, throughout the day and evening, will be found an agent representing this department. By means of telephonic communication between the hotels and the stables, these agents can provide in a surprisingly short time saddle-horses for a ride down one of the many bridle-paths, turnouts for a drive along the shady roads near the rim, or sure-footed animals for a descent into the Canyon on Hermit Trail (now nearing completion), or Bright Angel Trail.
The Buildings in Detail. The several buildings of the transportation department, which are located among the trees a short distance from the hotel, across the railroad track, are all new and well built, being models in design and construction, and are thoroughly systematized for rapid service.
That portion of the stables where the animals are kept, and which accommodates about one hundred and fifteen head, is thoroughly equipped with the most approved methods for the care of the stock, including a complete system-for drainage and cleanliness; vermin proof, zinc-lined storage bins, and automatic self-recording feeding apparatus. Other departments are a blacksmith, carpenter and paint shop; harness, storage, and repair rooms, offices for the stable manager and his assistants; and a large wagon-room where the carriages, wagons, and other conveyances are housed. Visitors to this part of the stables will note an interesting feature in the painting of the vehicles, namely, that each is in the El Tovar colors, the body being dark yellow, and the wheels lighter yellow, striped with red. Each coach bears, in addition to the coat of arms of Pedro del Tovar, an individual name, selected from tribes of the Southwest Indians. For instance, visitors will recall having driven to various points on the rim in stages named "Navaho," "Supai," "Walpi," etc.
A large corral provides for the turning out of stock not in use.
Employees' Quarters. There is also a building devoted to the accommodation of the employees of this department, comprised of kitchen and dining-rooms, sleeping quarters, and a smoking, reading and recreation room.
The grounds around the employees' building, commonly called the mess house, are laid off into walks and gardens. Owing to the quantity and quality of the soil being superior to that around El Tovar (which is near the rim and therefore on almost naked rock), the grass, and the domestic and wild flowers, which are cared for by the men, thrive abundantly.
The Mallery Grotto. This is a small and rather insignificant cave just under the rim, to the extreme left (west) of El Tovar amphitheatre, wherein a number of interesting Indian pictographs are to be seen. The overhanging rock makes a rude cave or grotto, and it has been named Mallery Grotto, after Garrick Mallery, the great authority on the pictographs of the North American Indians. His latest monograph takes up the whole of one of the large volumes of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, and in its nearly eight hundred pages there are one thousand two hundred and ninety illustrations. To this illuminating book, therefore, the curious student is referred for further information regarding the pictographs themselves.
Trail to Mallery Grotto. Leaving El Tovar, the visitor can easily walk to and from Mallery Grotto in half an hour: Keeping on the rim, he passes the old Bright Angel Hotel, and all the buildings, about as far past the log house as, that is from El Tovar. There, in a slight depression, he will see the foot-trail leading down from the rim to the Grotto. It is a place about forty to fifty feet long, and with an overhanging wall of from five to fifteen feet high, and ten to twenty feet broad. The shelf upon which one walks is narrow, but I have slept there many a time in cold and rainy weather.
The pictographs are mainly in a rich brownish-red, and are of deer, mountain-sheep, men and women, serpentine lines suggesting the course of rivers, rain-clouds, lightning, and many-legged reptiles,--or what seem to represent these things. They were here, exactly as one now sees them, when I first camped here with some friendly Havasupais, nearly twenty years ago, and I was then informed that some of the designs represent great hunts, in which their ancestors had been successful.
Of the genuineness of the pictographs no one need have the slightest question. They afford a good opportunity to those who have never before seen such specimens of aboriginal art, to examine a fairly representative lot of them.
