Thither & Yon

A series of selfies taken at each mile (according to my watch):

And then a few actual hiking pictures:

Transcription:

Saturday, May 1, 2021
UP AND OUT OF THE GRAND CANYON!

It turns out going to bed at 9pm does not come naturally to me, even when I was up a 6am and have hiked 17 miles in the last two days. I’m sure I was just starting to drift off For Real when the alarm went off at 4am, but I got up anyway. We had a disgusting breakfast of freeze-dried biscuits and gravy (my least favorite of the pouch meals, but you don’t start this hike on an empty stomach, and even if I wanted to pay for another $30 breakfast, early service doesn’t start until 5am. That’s what I get for thinking 6:30 as “late” service is funny).

We were on the trail by 4:45, lighting our way with cell phones because we’ve never had occasion to equip for hiking in the dark. After the first mile, the sky had lightened enough to ditch the phone lights. The river was so beautiful in the pre-dawn light.

We made rockin’ progress for the first 5 miles, at about which point the sun finally appeared above the rim and the trail finally started making serious upward progress. We plugged along, and I kept myself motivated by promising at each mile that I only had to do one more, and that when we got to the Indian Gardens Campground, we would have a real break

In fact, I continued to be damned impressed with myself all the way up to the 3-Mile rest house at about 9:45am. We’d been hiking for 5 hours, had only put half of the elevation gain behind us, and My watch said we were 7.85 miles our 10-mile hike. But… the 3-Mile through Resthouse is so named because it’s … right 3 miles from the top. I, also, struggled with the math. As I finally surrendered to necessity and put on sunscreen, the piles of tired started catching up with me. I’d been taking a selfie every time a new mile ticked by. They looked like this:

But really, every face after #6 was drama. If I’d been taking honest selfies, every one after #6 would have looked like this:

Mouth hanging slightly open, eyes glazed and staring at the next step and the next step and the next step.

Those last “three” miles (3.6 by my watch), and very especially the last one mile, when you can see the top and also exactly how far away from it on how steep a hill you were, those last miles happened one step at a time.

We reached the rim at 12:05pm, having hiked a ten-mile hike in 11.15 miles, having climbed nearly 5,000 vertical feet. It took seven hours and twenty minutes, only one hour and 13 minutes more than it had taken us to hike the same distance down.

I amaze me, sometimes. We rewarded ourselves with a huge lunch at El Tovar and an expensive night at the Thunderbird Lodge. Long showers are so great…