“I wanna live your life, I’m on vacation this week with a bad back because I sneezed while on the toilet”
I laughed so hard when I saw Greg’s note on my post. We had barely any service on our 3-day Rim 2 Rim hike of the Grand Canyon, but his note came through loud and clear!
I replied, “Will post more pics so you can take the hike with us. What a marvelous world He made!” “Please do,” Greg replied, and here we are, three months later, and I’m finally making good.
Greg, in Kansas, watching a rare snowstorm, recuping from surgery, these posts are for you. Come join us on some of the remarkable turns of path that led to some of the most amazing moments of my life…
How did a Chick, a Lush and I get to be hiking into the dawn on October 1 of 2018, knowing we had 14 miles and an 8000 foot drop in altitude ahead of us? Not surprisingly, it’s kind of a long story, and maybe boring for you, Greg, so you can read about it in the post “A Walk with 2 REALLY Big Hills: How We Prepped,” or just skip it altogether and suffice to say that Brenda (Lush), Donna (Chick)–don’t they have fabulous last names?–and I trained and planned for months, but on this particular morning, we left a log cabin perched just feet from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, walked in the deep dark with our loaded packs to the front of the Grand Canyon Lodge and climbed into a waiting shuttle, and rode to the top of the North Kaibab Trail where we loaded our packs onto our backs, switched on our head lamps to “red” so we wouldn’t blind each other, adjusted our hiking poles, and began our descent.
“Beware the trail puddles,” I kept warning as we descended, but when we saw our first, I knew I didn’t need to say it again. Trail puddles are obvious, they cover the path, and they are smelly!
Of course, you may wonder how it can be that the dry, desert conditions of the Canyon would produce “trail puddles” at all. Well, it’s not a weather phenomenon. It’s mules. Mules produce trail puddles, and mules have no notion of a place for everything, and everything in its place…but it seems that if one goes, they all seem to get the urge, so there are places where we step gingerly and hold our noses for quite a ways before we can take our pace back up again.
When I first thought about doing the Rim2Rim, I imagined running it. Do you remember the 20-mile walkathon they used to have every year from Monroe to Central Valley, Greg? Well, I ran it one year with Sheila Stack (all those Stacks were great runners), and I’ve done some long runs since then, so I thought it would be cool to say, “I ran across the Grand Canyon,” but I guess I’ve gotten wiser as I’ve gotten older, because I dropped that idea pretty quick when I researched and found out that the heat in the Canyon is a huge danger. Lots of folks do still run, though, and as dawn was starting to break, I got to wondering when our new friends Kelly and Maresa were going to come from behind and pass us. And suddenly, they appeared!
Despite our “assigned” roles, it was Donna who spoke truth when, in early summer, she, Brenda and I started seriously planning the trip. She said, “If we are going all the way to the Grand Canyon, I want to SEE the Canyon. Why are we thinking we want to rush across it?” It stopped me dead. How more right could she be? Just over 1% of all the people who visit the Canyon every year actually go below the Rim. If we were to go all the way down to the River, why would we want to rush out?
This led to a new wrinkle, though. You see, while anyone can go into the Canyon, there are only limited ways to STAY in the Canyon. I don’t know what it’s like in Kansas, Greg, but when you hike overnights here in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, you can stay in an Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) Hut with a bunk, running water, and served meals for a good chunk of change (reservations recommended); you can stay at an AMC shelter, with a 3-sided hut where you pull up a piece of the floor for your sleeping bag, get an outdoor community kitchen area, and composting toilets for $10/head, or at official campsites, sometimes with platforms and “amenities” as the shelter (both are first come first served) for the same price; or you can “stealth” camp with no comforts beyond what nature provides. You just have to be off trail and out of range of one of the official shelters and campgrounds .
In the Canyon, though, to prevent over use of the resources, there are limited number of campsites and to snag one, you must win a lottery weeks in advance. Of course, they can’t stop you from being in the Canyon at night without a campsite, but the Park Service tells you up front: you just can’t stop. How they police this, I don’t know, but I really didn’t see any need to test the system. We applied for the lottery in July to get campsites in the first week of October. We were creative and applied for a variety of itineraries, hit “send,” and crossed our fingers…
And LOST.
What should we do? We had plane tickets. Our dream was to hike Rim2Rim, but if that wasn’t possible, should we go anyway? Well, there was a glimmer of hope (sort of like those red Adirondack chairs in the snow I shared last week.) Plans change, and people cancel reservations, and the Park Service holds a limited number of sites open, so once you’re at the Canyon, you can check in at the Ranger Station and get in on the daily lottery and hope. AND there’s another option, too: The cabins and dorms at Phantom Ranch are run by concessionaire Xanterra, and although their opening date (18 months in advance at that time) had long passed, they do get cancellations and spots open up. We could check their website regularly and call to see if anything was available. We decided to go for it.
Next up? A Hard-to-Believe Tale: We Got to Hike & Sleep at the Bottom of the World!