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
