A ranger friend of ours told us about this movie that came out last year. It is titled ” The Canyon” and it’s about a couple that have an ill fated honeymoon in the Grand Canyon. Since Debbie and I spend half of our time there, we had to check out the flick to for laughs and really we got our money’s worth. The main characters in the film go through an hysterical gauntlet of events that don’t happen to canyon hikers but somehow these people seem to survive.
Yvonne Strahovski fights offs Grand Canyon wolves
The movie does get some facts straight such as: you need a permit to get to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Williams AZ is one place you can stay before heading below the rim, and this is a destination you can head to after a stay in Las Vegas. Other than that, there are some main facts that movie entirely gets wrong.
The first is that you can hire a rouge guide to take you on a mule trip into the canyon. Mule trips are booked through Xanterra Corp and mules are only allowed on the Bright Angel, South Kaibab and part of the North Kaibab trail. Any unauthorized mule trip would have been spotted pretty quickly and their trip terminated but if that happened we wouldn’t have had much of a movie. Another mistake the movie makes is the presence of wolves in the canyon. Wolves are nowhere to be found in the canyon yet the newlywed couple are attacked by by a pack of them which adds to the drama won’t ever happen. The most unrealistic thing about the movie is that you hardly ever see the people in the movie drink water. This movie is supposed to take place at the end of May which usually averages 90 degrees plus during the day so the characters in this movie should have died of dehydration about half way through the movie.
Veteran actor Will Patton plays Henry the hired guide that claims to have been stung by scorpions and bit by a mule among other war stories. If you ever are thinking of hiring a guide and he is telling you this stuff, he is either full of crap or he doesn’t know what he is doing so don’t hire him either way.
I could go on about more crazy things in this film but I’ll stop rambling. Thankfully not many people saw this flick so I haven’t gotten questions about the canyon wolves yet. If you want a taste of the movie, check out the trailer. If you’ve been to the canyon before, it is worth renting or ordering on NetFlix for the laughs.
Tags: Grand Canyon movie, Grand Canyon myths, The Canyon movie
