Going up

The Grand Canyon is a unique hike in more ways than I can count.  But one of the most distinguishing aspects of hiking the canyon is that you are constantly reminded of what you'll be going through on your way out.

In many cases, the hike down into the canyon is the second-most difficult physical test achieved by most people that accomplish it.  The most difficult test, of course, is the hike out.  And all you can think about between the two hikes is how bad your legs hurt after the first one, and how the second one is going to be far worse.  The Phantom Ranch staffers all commented on how this brings out some the most primitive instincts in the ranch's guests.

Most people hike out of the canyon the day after they hike in.  So they get to the bottom of the canyon completely wiped out, and then they turn around and look at what they'll need to surmount the next day.

And it's kind of hard to put this in perspective with a photo, but take a look at the relatively small crack in the canyon noted by the green arrow (click on the photo for a larger view).

Now look at the same point, but from the bottom of the canyon.  It's one hell of a climb.

And that's not a fun realization if this is your first hike in several years.  Apparently, that scenario is incredibly common.  As in, pretty much everyone that stays at the ranch.  So people are slogging (or perhaps Kaibab Shuffling) throughout the ranch, feeling a mix of anger, frustration, and sheer panic.  It's not a pretty sight.

To be honest, Aimee and I weren't too worried about the hike up.  We were looking forward to counter-stretching our legs from the hike down.  Plus, we were in no rush, so we could take as many breaks as we needed.

We set out around 5am, and the sight of the sun rising over the canyon walls was nothing short of breathless.

We took the Bright Angel trail up to the South Rim, and the scenery was markedly different than the Kaibab trail that we took down.  The Kaibab trail was pure desert, with open, sandy vistas, and plenty of cactus.  The Bright Angel trail was green, lush, and looked more like Germany than Arizona.

The scenery was enough to distract us for the first few hours of the hike.  But around 9 am, we started to feel the climb.  We never said it out loud, but there were a few times that we wished the Grand Canyon wasn't so damn grand.  Even though Bright Angel trail was a little less steep than the Kaibab trail, we still needed to climb thousands of feet and hike nine miles of trail.  It was no walk in the park, and we completely understood the terror of people who hit the bottom and realized what they were in for on the way up.  There's no shortcut, and there's no calling off the hike early.  You hike until you reach the top (or until someone calls the Medevac helicopter).  There's no in between.

The tone of that last paragraph is all wrong.  I must be going for dramatic effect.  The trail is an absolute stunner, and it's definitely doable for most people (with the right amount of preparation).  We saw all kinds of people on the trail, from geared-out adventurers to young families on their first hike.

And speaking of all types of people, there's a special type of adventure hiker that Aimee and I just didn't understand.  This guy:

The real version of this hiker looked nothing like the warning-sign version.  It's the rim-to-rim hiker that tries to go from one rim to the bottom, and back up the other rim in one day.  You can tell who they are every time, since they have no gear, an undersized Camelbak, and some kind of ironic piece of attire to tell you that they're hipsters outside of the canyon (thick-rimmed glasses, neon marathon shorts, a 90s-era Nike tank top, etc.).  They were, almost without exception, 24 to 28 year-old males, and they never said hi as they blew past you on the trail.

We had a pretty good time making fun of these knuckleheads, and they deserved every bit of it.  Most people visit the canyon to experience an amazing part of our planet.  The rim-to-rim hiker is out to conquer it, and to check one more thing off his list.  We didn't get it.

As we kept climbing, we passed through distinct regions of the canyon, which had their own distinct types of hikers.  The rim-to-rim hikers were most often seen at the bottom of the trail at 7am, since they started their hike from the top at an ungodly hour.  The family hikers were concentrated a little bit further up the trail, since most of them spent the night at Indian Gardens campground (which is conveniently located almost exactly halfway down the canyon).  The mule riders and day hikers were a little higher up, and as soon as we saw the foreign tourists with their Las Vegas baseball caps and oversized cameras, we knew that we were close!

By 11:00, we had been hiking for almost six hours, and we knew that the rim couldn't be far off.  We started basing our distance by the people we saw.  We were a little judgmental, and I'm not proud of it, but there are definitely people at the Grand Canyon that you just know couldn't have been hiking for more than twenty minutes.

Those calculations turned out to be pretty close.  By 11:30, we could see the trailhead and the visitor's center, so we turned around to take in one last view of the canyon.

And just a few minutes later, we were out!  It felt amazing!

I still can't get over how put-together Aimee was at the top.  She looked like she just walked around the block, and I looked like I...well...like I just climbed out of the Grand Canyon!

It was an absolutely amazing trip.  The scenery was continuously jaw-dropping, and the company at the bottom couldn't have been better.  We'll definitely be back.  It might take us a few years to forget how bad our legs hurt, but we'll be back.

Warmup hike

We woke up on Sunday feeling like a hike.  We were (happily) cabin-bound by the rain the day before, so we wanted to get out and explore some more of the canyon.  We would be heading out the next morning, and there are a ton of great day hikes near the ranch.

Greg recommended Ribbon Falls, one of the few waterfalls in the area.  And as a bonus, the falls were very close to some small Native American ruins.  The destination was perfect, but the hike out there wasn't exactly a walk in the park.  The falls were seven miles from the ranch, so our total hike for the day would be fourteen miles.  This, of course, would be happening one day before we hike out of the Grand Canyon.  But we were starting to recover from the Kaibab Shuffle, and the destination seemed entirely worth the effort.

But even without factoring in the destination, the hike itself was spectacular.  The trail follows Bright Angel Creek and meanders its way through the mini-canyon that it formed.

As always, photos by Greg Bryan.

Every now and then, we would come to a wide part in the canyon which would give us clear views of the North Rim (we came in from the South Rim).  The North Rim is about a thousand feet higher, and a little harder to access, so getting a peek was a nice treat.

The weather was still a bit overcast from the day before, and there was still clearly snow remaining at the top of the canyon (i.e. where we were headed the next day).

Ribbon Falls is actually two sets of waterfalls.  Lower Ribbon Falls is the main one that people hike to, and has some very interesting geological formations.  Upper Ribbon Falls is smaller, and requires (as the name implies) an additional one mile hike up the canyon to where Lower Ribbon Falls originates.

That one mile hike is enough to deter most people (since they've already hiked six miles to get there), so Upper Ribbon Falls is very rarely visited.  But the extra effort was definitely worth it.

The waterfall was a relatively small one, but in a desert canyon, any water feature is an attraction.

The Native American ruins were from a grain storage area that was carved into the side of the canyon.  It was in a cool, tucked away area, and seemed like a very smart place to protect food from the desert heat.

And here's me writing what you're reading now.

The hike the upper falls took us out from the bottom of the canyon, and gave us a great vantage point to look around.  But even Greg's fantastic photos barely do it justice.  It was stunning.

We hiked back down to Lower Ribbon Falls, and easily understood why it was the bigger attraction.

Upper Ribbon Falls derive their charm from being serene and tucked away, but the lower falls are much more visually striking.  The green, moss-covered mound is actually travertine stone formed by minerals in the water accumulating over millions of years.

What's especially amazing is that you can easily walk up behind the falls and get an amazing view of the canyon.

Now for a peek behind the curtain.  As I've mentioned, we've had our own personal photographer with us on the entire trip.  And Greg wasn't messing around.  His hiking pack contained two cameras, a handful of lenses and plenty of filters.  He looked every bit the photojournalist that he is.  Talk about a perfect hiking buddy.

After a quick lunch on the trail, we headed back to the ranch.  But by this point, breakfast was catching up with me.  That morning, I picked through the ranch kitchen and put together a giant bowl of granola, raisin bran, dried cherries and dried apricots.  What the hell was I thinking?  An injection of pure tree bark would have had less fiber.  The seven-mile hike out felt like a seventy mile death march on the way back in. I was struggling pretty bad.

And to make matters worse, the trail was a two-foot wide path with a rock wall on one side and the creek on the other.  There wasn't a tree in sight to hide behind.  Suffice it to say that the Tecate we had back at the ranch was one of the best beers I've had in my entire life.

Of course, this was all just a warm up for tomorrow's hike out.

Rainy day in the Grand Canyon

Remember how I could barely walk yesterday, but everyone said that the next day would be far worse?  That was a true statement.  I literally fell to the floor when I got out of bed.  And Aimee enjoyed watching that a bit too much.  Our calves locked up immediately after taking each step, and the best we could hope for was to waddle from side to side, hoping our back leg would swing out in front of the other.  There was a name for this.  It's called the Kaibab shuffle, named after the leg-abusing trail that we took to the bottom of the canyon.

Our condition wasn't really helped by us having an ambitiously early fishing schedule that morning.  I was pretty convinced that my empty fishing line was due to the time of day that we were fishing.  So I set my alarm for 5:30 and we headed out to Bright Angel Creek before breakfast.  As it turns out, the time of day didn't help my fishing much, but the scenery was great.

By the way, having a professional photographer friend that feels very bad about dropping your camera is a wonderful thing to have at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  In Greg's capable hands, an early morning fishing trip turns into a Land's End catalog shoot.

But again my line kept coming up empty, and we were getting pretty hungry.  So we headed back to the ranch for breakfast.

Aimee and I were both convinced that we had the best omelets of our lives that morning.  We also discovered that there are automated salt and pepper shakers at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  You press a button to activate the salt or pepper grinder and turn on a flashlight that illuminates your food.

Not only do these things exist, but they exist at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  You have to know Greg Bryan to use them, but they're down there.

(In all fairness, one of the staffers brought them down as a joke, but that doesn't change the fact that there are battery operated salt and pepper shakers at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.)

At breakfast, we ran into Molly, who apparently used to teach fly fishing before she started working at Phantom Ranch.  How we've spent 36 hours at the bottom of the Grand Canyon without realizing that we were sharing a bunkhouse with a fishing teacher is beyond me, but at least we figured that out with plenty of time left to fish.  I pretended to know what she was talking about, and she pretended to not notice my complete lack of fly fishing knowledge.

We get in about 30 minutes of some very illuminating instruction before Molly had to go back to laundry duty.

We spent the rest of the morning at Bright Angel Creek.  Our luck didn't change, but at least we started to look the part.

Now that we were starting to get the hang of this, we decided to head back out to "the confluence" (where Bright Angel Creek joins the Colorado River).  We came back to the ranch to get some snacks, and saw the packer mules getting ready for their trip back up.

They get loaded up with the prior day's trash, and I suddenly felt very guilty for all of the Tecates that I've been drinking.

The confluence was as beautiful as it was the day before, but our photos somehow looked far nicer.  Did I mention how nice it was to have Greg along as our personal photographer?  He felt way guiltier than he needed to, but I wasn't going to tell him how old my camera was.  The photos were turning out far to nicely.

The last two photos are phenomenally misleading.  I actually spent most of my time tying on new flies after I lost the last one...

...getting my line stuck in the brush...

...and catching Aimeefish.

Around lunchtime, the rainclouds started coming in, so we headed back to the ranch.  Rain at the bottom of the canyon, usually means snow at the top.  We thought of the river guide that we met the night before that was now leading her group out though the snow.

We were pretty happy that we still had a couple more days at the bottom.

The rain stopped coming down around 3 pm,  and we briefly considered going out for a hike.  But a fire at the bunkhouse sounded far nicer.  As did margaritas.  Another great day in the canyon.

-M

Yep, I'm sore

After something like 10 hours of completely motionless sleep, I almost fell out of the loft as I first put weight on my unresponsive legs.  And the worst part was that everyone at breakfast said that the next day would be even worse.

The pain was an unusual one.  Of course there was plenty of muscle soreness, but not in the usual places.  The muscles that keep us upright when we're walking downhill with 40 pounds of weight on our shoulders are small, not often used, and apparently distributed everywhere from our toes to our eyeballs.  And as long as we kept moving, our muscles stayed loose, and we were ok.  But each time that I stopped to tie my shoes could have been my last.

And this was all before breakfast.

Greg had the weekend off, so we all slept in until about 9 or so.  We missed the usual hot breakfast that the staff cooks for itself around 6:30am, so we foraged through the ranch's considerable food stocks.  I had fruit loops.  (Don't judge me, I needed some comfort food.)  Aimee had corn flakes with dried cranberries and sliced almonds.

For the record, you can eat corn flakes with dried cranberries and sliced almonds at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  It's possible.  You have to know Greg Bryan, but it's possible.

Our choices:

The plan for the day was to go fly fishing, which worked out well, since that was about the maximum amount of physical activity that I was capable of.  The problem was that I really didn't know how to fly fish.  And if any of you just thought, "how hard could fly fishing be?", you've never been fly fishing.  Which would make two of us.

Turns out, it's pretty hard.  The difference between fly fishing and regular fishing is that there's no weight on the end of the line.  Just a dinky little fake bug (the "fly") that you somehow have to whip across the water and make land on the water in formations that mimic the natural movements of the insects in the area.  Nothing to it.  But since there's no weight on the the line, it goes about four inches when you cast it like a regular fishing line.

There are all kinds of special techniques that you use to make a weightless fishing line defy physics and fly out across a river.  My exposure to these techniques consisted of ten minutes on Wikipedia the night before we left, and a quick phone call with Aimee's college roommate.  Beth (the roommate) is not only a pretty adroit fly fisher herself, but she is actually married to a professional fly fisher.  The only problem with my plan was that we called Beth on our way from Flagstaff to the Canyon, which (as you might imagine) is pretty much one big mountain pass.  Here's how the conversation went:

Me: Hi, Beth.  Ok.  Tell me everything I need to know about fly fishing.
Beth: Ok, well let's start with...SSSSSSSS
Me: Hello?
Beth: SSSSSS...tie the fly...SSSSSSSSS
Me: Beth?
Beth: SSSSSSSS...take the fishing rod...SSSSSSSS

So in other words, my first few attempts at casting the line were pretty unsuccessful.  I should have just tied the line into a hundred knots at home, left the fishing pole behind, and saved myself a lot of time.  But when the scenery is this nice, who pays attention to the fish?

As a side note, this was actually the last photo that my camera ever took.  I had handed my camera off to Greg when I went to go fish.  Incidentally, Greg Bryan is a professional photographer.  Really.  Before he worked at Phantom Ranch, he was a staff photographer for the Arizona Daily Star, and at least one other newspaper in Flagstaff.   So he knows his way around a camera.  His footing on the river rocks, however, was another story.

Greg went down just after he snapped this photo, and my camera went with him.  But if there's a way for a camera to die, it's in the hands of a professional photographer at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

I'll miss that little camera, but it's in a better place now.

We spent the afternoon slowly teaching ourselves how to fly fish.  The results weren't pretty.

That was me thinking, "Shit.  I lost another fly."

And this was our biggest catch of the day.

The spot we were fishing at was the intersection of Bright Angel Creek (which runs next to Phantom Ranch) and the Colorado River (which, of course, is at the bottom of the canyon).  The river widens considerably at the point where they meet, forming a little beach and slowing the flow of the river.  This makes a great landing point for river rafting trips.

Conveniently, this spot is also about the halfway point for boats traversing the full length of the canyon (the trip takes just over two weeks).  So it's also a good place for boaters to disembark.  For people that can't take the full two weeks to raft the canyon, most guide companies offer a halfway trip.  The boaters either start with the group and hike out where we hiked in, or hike in and finish the trip by boat.

In fact, when we went back to Phantom Ranch that afternoon, we met a guide who had hiked people into the canyon to meet up with this boat group, and would be bringing some other people back out the next morning.  Not a bad gig.

After an unsuccessful fishing outing (or as I like to call it, a very successful meditation on the river), we headed back to the ranch to pack lunches for people hitting the trail that day.  Even though it was Greg's day off, we volunteered to pack some lunches and earn some good will from the other staffers (after all, we were drinking a considerable amount of their Tecates).

The ranch (for a fee) provides simple little trail lunches for their guests.  We had a good time putting the packages together, but I was crippled with guilt for the rest of the afternoon when I realized that a few unlucky hikers would have to suffer without the Oreos that I forgot to toss in their bags.

And the afternoon wouldn't have been complete without a quick trip to the mule stables.  The "packer" mules that bring supplies down to the ranch go down and back the same say, but the "wrangler" mules that bring people down to the ranch spend the night at the bottom, and take the guests back up the next morning.

This is Aimee offering an apple and her fingers as lunch for one lucky wrangler mule.

We spent the rest of the afternoon using the ranch's small arsenal of muscle massagers.  Clearly we were not the first people to feel the canyon's wrath.

And that night was one of the staffers' birthdays, and dinner was an absolute feast.  I assumed that it was for the birthday, but the feast was normal.  The made-from-scratch cake was for the birthday, but the five course meal was just an average dinner at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  I'm almost positive that I actually managed to put on weight from this trip.

The evening was spent in the staff bunkhouse with Greg, a handful of other staffers, Tecate, whisky, and the Reader's Digest Tumbling Tumbleweeds Country/Western record compilation.  All in all, not a bad day.

-M

Home Sweet Home

The hike from the Colorado River to Phantom Canyon was short, but more importantly, flat.  It weaves along Bright Angel Creek, and one of the two campsites at the bottom.  Suckers.

And then we saw it, Phantom Ranch, our home and Tecate supplier for the next four days.

The place is perfect.  It's absolutely everything that you'd hope a lodge at the bottom of the Grand Canyon would be.  It has the same familiar stone-and-log look as the buildings at the top of the canyon, and it's comprised of a couple dozen small buildings spread out across an area about the size of a football field.  Most of the buildings are one bed/one bath cabins that the guests rent, and then the rest are the shower house, cantina, kitchen and other common areas.

In case you're wondering, the rental rates for the cabins are pretty reasonable.  They're in the ballpark of $100 for a two-person room, and if you just want a bed in the one of the larger dorm cabins, that'll cost you about $40.  It's no Luxury Inn, but it's still a pretty great deal.

However, where they really get you is the food.  As you can probably guess, all of the food needs to be carried in by mule.  That, coupled with the novelty of a four-course steak dinner at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, brings the dinner cost up to almost $50 a person.

But I digress.  First, we needed to unpack.  Greg had told us that we'd be staying in the guest loft, which is a much nicer term than "attic next to the swamp cooler".

But when it comes to a free place to stay, this was pretty much as amazing as it gets.

That ladder takes us up into our sleeping area, and the rest of the room is essentially the staff living room.  There was a fridge, a couple of couches, and one of the most amazing record collections that I've ever seen.

The front of the staff fridge sums up the place.

It didn't take us long to unpack, since we really didn't need to bring anything.  There was no need to bring a tent, food, or even much water.  In fact, about half of my pack weight was from the two bottles of liquor that we brought Greg as a thank you gift.

Once we had everything put away in our "loft", we headed over to the staff dining area for dinner.  What we saw was one of the biggest surprises of the trip.  Frittata.  Our dinner was a ham and spinach frittata with a side of crispy kale and yams.  At the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  I've never eaten so well, even when the food didn't need to brought in by mule.

That would be a running theme down there.  The Phantom Ranch staff eat like royalty!  Even with the hikes in, out, and around the Grand Canyon, I have no doubt that I put on weight from this trip.

As you might imagine, we didn't last long that evening.  We had couple of Tecates on the couch to get caught up with Greg and meet some of the other staffers, and that was about all that we could squeeze out of the day.

Coincidentally, there was a staff meeting planned for that night at 11pm (that's when the last shift of workers are done for the day).  Greg apologized in advance for keeping us up, since the meeting was in the living room right below our beds--as if that could have kept us up.  And apparently, the meeting was going to get contentious.  There was a bit of tension between the stay-up-lates and the early-risers over the amount of evening noise in the living room.  But I knew it was going to be alright when I saw the parting note that an outgoing staffer left to the group on his last day (which was apparently the day before we arrived).

We were going to like this place.

Going Down

Hiking the Grand Canyon is like climbing a mountain in reverse.  The obvious difference being that when you think that you're halfway done with the hike, you still have a mountain to climb.  So like many other hikers, we decided to separate the down from the up.  But unlike many other hikers, we had a friend at the bottom.

Your rest options at the bottom of the Grand Canyon are pretty limited.  You can either make a reservation a year ahead of time for Phantom Ranch, which will cost you a pretty penny, or you can throw your tent in your backpack and camp at one of the two campsites at the bottom.  But not only do you add 20 pounds to your gear, you still need to reserve your space at least a year ahead of time.  And even camping isn't cheap at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.  So you can imagine how thrilled we were when Greg, our friend from Tucson said, "Yeah, come on over!"  He offered us the guest room of the staff bunkhouse and let us pick pretty much any date that we wanted.  It was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

But even though our living arrangements were about as amazing as they can get, we still had to make our way down there.  And for that, we picked the South Kaibab trail.  There are two main trails that will get you from the South Rim of the canyon to the bottom: South Kaibab and Bright Angel.  South Kaibab is shorter but steeper, and Bright Angel is longer, flatter, and more scenic.  We wanted to see them both, and we decided that steeper is less of a problem when we're going down.

Of course, next to this lovely trail map is an equal amount of space dedicated to warning you that you're probably not going to make it out alive.

The top poster reminds you that 250 people are rescued from the canyon each year, and the one below it tells a pretty depressing story of a marathon runner (and medical student) that died in the canyon because she underestimated the distance and amount of water that she'd need.  That's the polite way of saying that you're fatter and dumber than this girl, and she didn't make it.  But have a wonderful hike.

Of course, that didn't stop us, and it probably doesn't stop anyone else.  But is does make you double check that your Camelbak is full.

And with all of the final checks done, we were off!

The South Kaibab trail is pretty much just one giant switchback.  It's the trail that the Phantom Ranch staff (and mule drivers) use to get up and down quickly.  "Quickly" of course meaning "seven miles of trail with a five thousand foot elevation change".

But if you can remember to look up at all during the hike, the scenery is almost enough to distract you from the abuse that your knees are taking.

And I can't really figure out how to work this photo into the story, but no Grand Canyon hike is complete without a photo of us impossibly close to the edge of one of the largest canyons in the world.

About halfway down the trail, we got a sneak peak of the Colorado River.  We were fully aware that the bottom was still very far away, but simply seeing the bottom of the canyon is a pretty motivating sight.

But just as quickly as the river appears, it vanishes behind another cliff with another mega-run of switchbacks.

And now comes the loopiness.

This is us at the sign reminding you that you're still not even halfway there.

Aimee's smile went away very quickly when she tried to stand back up.

But we were getting closer!

And about the time that our smiles were fading and our knees were throbbing, we saw a redeeming figure off in the distance.  Jesus?  No, Greg Bryan!  But he hasn't cut his hair since he left Tucson, so you could forgive us for thinking that it was Jesus.

And he really was our savior.  He surprised us on the trail about two miles out from Phantom Ranch, which would have been amazingly cool of him, even if he didn't have three cold Tecates in his backpack. Cold!  Tecates!  This was, without a doubt, the most amazing moment on the most amazing hike that I've ever been on.  We drank Tecates on the South Kaibab trail.  I still can't get over that!

And when a seven mile hike is punctuated with Tecates, it's hard to go up from there.  However, crossing the bridge at the bottom of the Grand Canyon was a pretty amazing experience.

And even though Phantom Ranch was still a few hundred yards away, we barely noticed.  We were home!