Once the sunset, I’d gotten word that there would be a meteor shower that night and that there wasn’t any better place to view it than the Grand Canyon. This worked for me because one of the central reasons for going to Arizona was for stargazing. I decided that the best place to see the stars was where I started at Mather Point. As I walked towards the observation point–or at least attempted to–I stopped to take a few shots of the stars set against features like rocks and solar towers. The closer I got to Mather Point, however, the more irrational my fear became that I’d be somehow attacked by a bear or mischievous/murderous person on the grounds. My thinking went: The Grand Canyon is so large and Mather Point so isolated that I could scream and not a soul would realize I was in paranoid danger. Weighing the risk to reward–I wasn’t going to see an outline of the Grand Canyon–I continued to gaze and shot in the complete dark, just not at the rim. I was out for about 2 hours when I came to the conclusion that I would not see the meteor shower. I wasn’t disappointed though. I marveled at the volume of stars that were in the sky and the faint, ever-present glow of our Milky Way Galaxy. I saw a few random shooting stars, a few star clusters, and a number of satellites whizzing about. As I stared up, I felt completely satisfied and restored in the sense that I was connected to something more and forced down my last bit of Alka-Seltzer.