The Grand Canyon in winter

GRAND CANYON VILLAGE, Ariz. — The outside temperature on my car's dashboard monitor read 5 degrees Fahrenheit as I approached the south entrance of Grand Canyon National Park at 8 a.m. on a mid-winter morning. I happened to mention the chilly number to the ranger at the drive-up window.

"Oh, I think it's warmer than that," he said — and it probably was in nearby Grand Canyon Village on the gorge's South Rim. "But we sometimes get into the minus-teens," a fact that he said surprises many visitors.

This is, after all, Arizona.

The high South Rim was enjoying blue skies after a 10-day stormy onslaught that had dumped more than 4 feet of snow at the park. Winds had howled, as well, and snow banks on cliff edges bore marks and patterns of their scouring and sculpting power.

Long, tall piles of plowed snow lined the village's still-icy roads and drastically shrunken parking lots. Many popular canyon viewpoints were not accessible, or required a bit of cross-country skiing or tramping through the snow to get to the rim-top vantages — generally by following the deep footsteps or foot-traffic trenches created by one's predecessors.

Ponderosa, pinyon and juniper tree branches sagged, laden with gobs of snow.

In open fields and meadows, white bumps hinted where smaller bushes and sagebrush lay hidden. They looked like an army of snowmen trying to emerge from the ground, just the tops of their heads beginning to show.

So: It was frigid, icy and wet, with almost no clouds to be seen — altogether a perfect time to drop by the Grand Canyon.

Rangers Marge Ullmann and Jack Howell, at the South Rim's new Mather Point information center, aren't surprised that tourists are surprised by the park's snowy conditions. For one thing, many arrive in winter via tour buses from lower-elevation desert metropolises like Las Vegas, 275 miles to the west.

"Yet it snows here every year," Howell said, "though it's not often we get three storms in one week."

A woman from Michigan had stopped by her desk, Ullmann said, and noted, "You've got more snow and it's colder here than it is back home!"

Virginia Martin, the nonprofit Grand Canyon Association's manager of the bookshop and information center in the century-old photography studio of Ellsworth and Emery Kolb, was in the village during the sequence of snowstorms. More than 2,000 people like her live in Grand Canyon Village, she said.