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
