What is Comanche Point?
East of Desert View the South Rim stops being a park and goes back to being a plateau. The pavement ends, the viewpoints end, and the rim swings north along the Palisades of the Desert toward the Little Colorado with no trail on it at all. Comanche Point, at 7,073 feet, is the one promontory on that stretch a strong day hiker can reach: a flat-topped point standing about 200 feet above the surrounding rim, with the Colorado River a mile below bending around the Unkar Delta and roughly nine miles of it in view from Unkar Creek to Carbon Creek. Across the water stand Vishnu, Jupiter and Apollo temples and Chuar Butte; east lie the Painted Desert and the gorge of the Little Colorado. There is a USGS marker at the edge and, most days, nobody.
Getting there is the hike. From Desert View, Cedar Mountain Road descends past the employee housing as a rutted, rocky two-track toward the cinder cone of Cedar Mountain. A long-abandoned jeep road, signed closed to all vehicles and bicycles, branches north toward Cape Solitude, washed out, blocked by fallen trees and growing over. After a few miles you leave it, drop into a small valley and climb about 600 feet cross-country to the point. Trip reports put the round trip from Desert View at 12 to 13 miles. The park neither signs nor maintains any of it.
What you get is the Grand Canyon as it was before the railings: a day alone on the rim above the river’s great eastern bend, with the Watchtower a toy on the skyline behind you. What you do not get is a trail, water, shade, a sign, cell signal or anyone to notice if you take the wrong drainage on the way back.
How to hike it right
Permits and fees. None for a day hike beyond the $35 entrance fee. Any night on the rim outside Desert View Campground requires a backcountry permit from recreation.gov for the Cape Solitude use area, where camping is at-large; $10 per permit plus $4 per person per night above the rim.
Get there. I-17 north to Flagstaff, US 89 north to Cameron, then SR 64 west 25 miles to the park’s east entrance at Desert View: about 215 minutes from Old Town, plus the entrance line. Park in the main Desert View lot. The dirt road begins beyond the residential area to the south, and the old parking spot near the water-treatment turnoff may be closed to visitors; walk from the main lot and you add half a mile each way and remove the question. Desert View has restrooms, a market, gas and the Watchtower, and nothing you pass after that has anything.
Pick the season. Late April, May, October and early November. The plateau holds snow from December into March, and the road is mud or drifts. July and August afternoons bring lightning to an exposed rim with no cover, and the point is the highest thing for miles. Start no later than seven in any month and give yourself seven to nine hours.
Navigate, do not follow. This is off-trail travel on a plateau where every pinyon looks like the last one. Load the route on a GPS before you lose signal at Cameron, carry a paper map and the ability to use both, and mark where you leave the jeep road; the drainages on the return look alike. The final mile crosses small cliff bands that are a scramble, not a climb, but loose.
Water. There is none from Desert View to the point and back. Carry three liters or more per person, a liter per two hours, and expect to finish it. Set a turnaround time and keep it.
The rim. No railings, no people, no signal. The last climb crosses loose cliff bands; stay back from the edge in wind, and do not let the dog, if you brought one against advice, run the rim.
Make a trip of it. Camp at Desert View or Mather, do Comanche on the full day, and spend the half day on the Watchtower and the Tusayan ruin. If you want the river itself, Lees Ferry is two hours around by Cameron.
Skip it if a long, dry, unsigned day for a view that the Watchtower approximates for free does not appeal. For a trail with the same canyon and a railing at the top, walk down the Bright Angel for an hour instead. If the trade does appeal, there is no better quiet on the South Rim.
A point named by a travel writer for a people who never saw it
The delta a mile below Comanche Point was a village. Ancestral Puebloan farmers worked the Unkar Delta from about 850 to 1200, terracing the river’s biggest bend and leaving the densest cluster of ruins in the inner canyon; from the point you look straight down on their fields. The canyon belongs to the histories of the Hopi, Navajo, Havasupai, Hualapai, Zuni and Paiute, and the plateau you walk across to reach the point ends, a few miles east, at the boundary of the Navajo Nation, which runs along the rim above the Little Colorado.
None of those peoples named it. In 1900 the travel writer George Wharton James, following the fashion of the day, gave the promontories of the South Rim the names of Native nations whatever their connection to the place, and this one became Comanche Point, for a people of the southern plains who never saw the canyon. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names made it official in 1906. One guidebook says James first called it Bissel Point for a railroad man and the name was changed in 1932; we found no second source for that and leave it as a footnote.
The park grew around it. Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Grand Canyon National Monument on January 11, 1908, and Congress made it a national park on February 26, 1919, with the eastern rim inside the line but nothing built on it. The building came in 1932, when Mary Colter, the Fred Harvey Company’s architect, finished the Desert View Watchtower at the end of the rim road: 70 feet of rough stone over a steel frame, with murals inside by the Hopi painter Fred Kabotie. The tower was the last of her Grand Canyon concession buildings and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1987. Every walk to Comanche Point starts in its parking lot, and from the point it is the only man-made thing in view.
The jeep road is the odd chapter. At some point in the middle of the century a track was pushed north from Cedar Mountain across the plateau to Cape Solitude, the point above the Little Colorado confluence, about 15 miles from Desert View, and for a generation anyone with a four-wheel drive could reach the loneliest viewpoint in the park; we could not find who built it or when. The park closed it to vehicles, posted the sign that still stands, and let it go: the washouts, fallen trees and brush you fight through are what a road becomes when nobody grades it for decades. The Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act of January 3, 1975 added Marble Canyon and the western monument to the park and changed nothing here. The eastern rim remained what it had been since 1919, a plateau with no trail that the park leaves, by policy, to people who can navigate.
What is coming is nothing, which is the point. The park has no plans for a trail, a sign or a parking area east of Desert View, and the Navajo Nation’s land begins a few miles on. Comanche will stay an unmaintained route for as long as the park keeps its eastern rim undeveloped, and the rescues that occasionally come out of the Cape Solitude country are the reason it keeps the warnings up.
Why it matters
Comanche Point is what the whole South Rim was before the Fred Harvey Company and the Park Service made it a destination: a plateau, a cliff, the river a mile down, and no one to tell you where to stand. It also carries the canyon’s naming problem in miniature, a Plains nation’s name on a rock above Puebloan fields at the edge of Navajo land, which is worth knowing as you look down at the delta. For a Scottsdale hiker the verdict is strict. If you can navigate off trail, carry three liters and keep a turnaround time, this is the quietest great view in the park and worth a 3.5-hour drive and a night at Desert View. If any of that is a question, the Watchtower is 100 yards from the car and the view is nearly the same.