Thither & Yon

For more details about Phantom Ranch and the lottery we won, keep looking for updates here. I swear I’m going to put a really nice post together about the whole process very soon. In the meanwhile, please enjoy these photos.

Transcription

Thursday, April 29, 2021 GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK

The great thing about playing it loose with your travel plans is that you have all the flexibility in the world to adjust your schedule to spend more or less time at places that interest you more or less than you expected. The downside is when you find out that doing the really cool things in those places required you to make a reservation. Six months ago.

Between the complications of living in COVIDland and the difficulty finding cat-sitters, planning this trip in advance was not practical for us. We’ve been trying to keep our research about one park ahead of our current location, so as we headed out of Cave Creek, we pulled up info on great ways to spend our three days allotted days in this magnificent park. We knew we wanted to try going to the bottom, and that without an advanced reservation for accommodations there, it could be difficult.

The good part? Opportunities exist to get onto last-minute cancelation waiting lists, and in COVIDland, last-minute cancelations are not uncommon. The bad part? If you want a favorable spot on such a list, be prepared to wake up reeeally early. Dustin called in at 5:30 on Wednesday morning, and when that didn’t pan out he got up and did it again this morning.

At 8:50, we got a call. Would we like to go down today? Normally your name is on the list for the following day, but they’d had a really last-minute cancelation, so even though it wasn’t much notice, would we be interested?

Yes, of course yes! Put us down.

Okay. Now it is almost 9am. Advice on these big hikes is to start really early, but we were 40 minutes outside the park and in no way packed for an overnight trip. But remember that thing about how great I am at being prepared? Half an hour later our backpacks were stocked with overnight gear for 2 nights, meals for 2 days, and more water than you could shake a stick at. There is plenty of water at the bottom of the canyon, but at this time of year, not a drop to be found on the 7-mile hike down.

Or… make that a 10-mile hike down. With our late notice, we’d missed the last shuttle taking hikers from the Bright Angel trailhead (our intended return route) to the South Kaibab trailhead. We would have to walk to the visitor’s center along the Rim Trail if we wanted our car to be waiting for us when we came back.

Off we set. Twenty pounds on your back makes even a level trail feel more arduous, and three miles of that was plenty of time to start questioning the wisdom of carrying said load down almost 5,000 vertical feet, which would also (as the sign said), require carrying it back up again.

But at 12:30 in the afternoon, we dropped over the edge of the South Rim and our fates were sealed.

The uppermost mile of the South Kaibab Trail was full-on crowded. It was a beautiful day with clear skies and a temperature hovering just above 70°. This is what you tackle if you’re not brave dumb enough to tackle a hike all the way to the bottom. So many people do the top mile that at times, the switchbacks look a lot like criss-crossing escalators at a big department store. Down-bound hikers are meant to yield to up-bound hikers, but the top mile is only chaos.

After a mile, you encounter a sign that is an exact replica of the sticker above, and the crowd starts to thin. They are serious about these warnings, including multiple signs informing would-be idiots that hiking to the bottom and coming back the same day is Advised Against in the Strongest Terms.

At the 4.5-mile resthouse (Tip Off), we encountered two groups of people who were not good at reading signs. The first pair had gotten to the bottom and were working their way back up. They looked done-in, but eventually moved out for many more hours of grueling up. Next we met a man on his own who’d made it to the bottom in 2 hours (insane!) but hadn’t seen any water [there] to drink and had run out. We gave him a liter of our water.

Dudes. C’mon.

So I was feeling pretty smug as we tipped off the edge into the final 2.5-mile, 1,400-foot descent, though my knees and toes had begun to whimper. And then a very sleek, very well-hydrated guy jogged past. JOGGED. The temperature had hit 90° by now, thanks to those beautiful granite rocks soaking up all the sun. JOGGED.

Twenty minutes later, he had reached the bottom, turned around, and jogged past us again, going uphill. Very uphill. He didn’t even look winded.

I can easily accept that I don’t have the discipline (or desire) to be that kind of athlete, still feel smug about being smarter than those guys at Tip Off, and believe I’m in the best shape of my life, but none of that could do a thing to prevent the groans that became an unstoppable part of every step down on the last mile. That many downhill miles carrying a load on unpracticed knees is brutal.

“You’ll let me know if something is actually wrong with you?” Dustin finally asked. “I don’t think I could tell the difference.”

I assured him I was (groan) perfectly fine (groan) and seriously, how much farther (groan) could that bridge be?

(one million miles!)

We (I) limped into Phantom Ranch just as the dinner bell was sounding for the $60 steak dinner we had opted out of. It smelled killer good. Instead we checked into our wonderful little air-conditioned cabin and cooked some freeze-dried rice and beans. (It was better than it sounds.)

It’s 9:00. I’m taking my very sad knees and toes to bed immediately because we did sign up for the $30 breakfast at 6:30am, which is the late seating. Looks like we have a good chance of getting to stay a second night, so I’ll gush about how freaking beautiful this place is tomorrow.