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2 Responses to 'Hotels/accomodation near Grand Canyon north rim or south rim?'

1. Odie - May 12th, 2010 at 8:00 am

   Have you looked in Sedona (Expensive but beautiful) and Flagstaff (Less expensive and a bit industrial).

   Good Luck enjoy the canyon.

2. sascoaz - May 14th, 2010 at 11:31 pm

   Yep… rooms at the park lodges and just outside the park boundary (like at Tusayan) are likely going to have been filled for weeks now. Are you talking about this weekend (today) or next weekend (Memorial Day)?

   Your best bet is to try Flagstaff (about 1.5 hours away) which has a wide range of hotel and food options. Contrary to the post above, Flagstaff is actually a very nice place with a focus on tourism and outdoor recreation and no real industry (it is also a university town). The old downtown area has many historic buildings now filled with shops, cafes, and art galleries and the town also has the excellent Lowell Astronomical Observatory (where Pluto was discovered) and the Museum of Northern Arizona. The town is actually a pretty popular tourist destination in itself. See links below for Flagstaff hotels.

   Sedona is a nice place (the famous red rocks of Oak Creek Canyon), but most places there are probably booked up and you are really not very close to the canyon at that point (2.5 hour drive). The town of Williams (just west of Flagstaff on I-40) is slightly closer to the canyon than Flagstaff, but is a much smaller town with considerably fewer lodging options.

   You might want to try the lodge at Cameron Trading Post to the east of the canyon. It has nice rooms, is sort of an interesting historic place in its own right, is less than an hour from the canyon and is often overlooked by visitors (see link below).

   On the North Rim, your options for lodging are more limited. Aside from the one lodge at the park, there are a couple of other small family-run lodges to the north and a few small hotels in the Kanab/Fredonia area on the AZ-UT border.

   As far as camping goes… there are pretty nice drive-up campgrounds at both rims, but they will likely be booked too (you can check online – see below). There really are not any good spots for open ‘at large’ camping near the South Rim, but you can pretty much camp anywhere you want in the National Forest surrounding the North Rim. You can even follow old dirt lumber roads to some pretty nice overlooks for camping – but this would be completely undeveloped (no water, bathrooms, picnic table, etc).

   And here is the biggest hint from a person that goes there a lot… while I would advise checking Flagstaff hotels first, after you have something lined up, if you still want to stay at one of the lodges in the park (which I highly recommend) than trying calling the Xanterra reservation phone number (don’t use the online reservations) once or twice a day this week. In my experience, you can often pick up a room when somebody changes plans and cancels at the last minute (in fact, 2 weeks ago I was able to reserve a room at Thunderbird Lodge for Memorial Day weekend despite it showing as ‘completely booked’ for the last two months).

   Good luck!

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