Monday, September 23, 2024
My brother Richie joined me at Grand Canyon to do a Rim-to-Rim hike. I have seen an acronym for this, R2R NB-BA, which means Rim-to-Rim North Kaibab Trail to Bright Angel Trail. The North Kaibab Trail leads from the North Canyon Rim to the Colorado River over approximately fourteen miles of downhill beauty. It was hard on the legs! One descends 5740’ along the way. From the river to the South Rim is about ten miles via River Trail and Bright Angel Trail. One ascends 4340’ along the way.
Perspective: the top floor of the Empire State Building is 1,250’.
A hike in the canyon immerses the individual in Nature on a number of levels. There is the geology, the mineral composition of minerals and methods of formation provides a wide variety of rocks. In one place, one can look at rocks that have formed on a continuum of time going back two million years. There is the power of plate tectonics being responsible for moving, lifting, and bending layers of rock, as well as the power of erosion via wind, water, and gravity. The weather varies greatly from North Rim to South Rim, and even more so as one studies or experiences the depths of the canyon. There is great variety of wildlife, plants and animals, as there are five major ecosystems present.
Of course, there is also the nature of the individual who hikes, who puts in the effort, who experiences the physical challenge with all the energies involved: perceptions-cognitions, emotions-feelings, and spiritual-transcendent.
Richie met me on Saturday (9/21) at the South Rim, where I had been camping the past five nights. We stayed at one of the Canyon Lodges, Maswik Lodge, that night. The next morning, we took Richie’s Ford Edge rental car to Jacob Lake, which is a little spot about forty-five miles north of the North Rim and North Kaibab Trail. We stayed at Jacob Lake Inn Sunday night.
Our original plan was to start hiking at 5AM. I figured we would need about thirteen hours to do the hike. I determined this by extrapolation, based on the hike we did two years ago, when we hiked down to the Colorado River via South Kaibab Trail and then hiked back up to the South Rim via Bright Angel. That hike was a seventeen-mile adventure, and it took us nine hours. I calculated that, if we did a similar pace, it would take us about 12h 45m. Call it thirteen. Richie had a time of eleven hours in mind.
We woke early, left Jacob Lake early, and arrived at the trailhead early, beginning at 3:40 AM with our headlamps lighting the way. It was chilly at the start. For some odd reason, the rental car was set to display temperature in Celsius. As we approached the North Rim it showed -2 degrees at one point. 0 Celsius is equal to 32 degrees, the freezing mark, and it was breezy, so it felt colder. Brrr!! Once we parked, we did not waste any time starting the hike.
The trail was rough. It was rocky and steep, more so than we anticipated. We both had thought it would be a relatively smooth trail, much like we recalled was the case on that previous canyon hike on the South Rim. Maybe the South Rim trails were better developed due to the fact that the South Rim has so many more visitors annually, nearly five million per year, while the North Rim has “only” about one million. Whatever the case, it was rocky and steep.
At one point, about an hour into the hike, we turned and looked up, back to where we had started. We could see a short line of headlamps, mimicking stars, other hikers who had begun after us. The actual stars above us were nice to see, too, though we really were concentrating our eyes downward on the trail. One false step here could ruin the day, so to speak.
It began to become lighter around 5:45. By 6 AM, we no longer needed our headlamps, and we were able to see amazing views of cliffs above us and, at times, amazingly steep drop-offs to the side of the trail. It’s a long way down! I’d like to come back and do this section of the trail up to the North Rim someday and marvel at the scenery. From our vantage point now, it seems we missed some dramatic visuals since we had hiked it in the dark.
Somewhere around 4.5 miles, we arrived at Roaring Spring Junction. Amazingly, water comes shooting out of the cliffside here in a dynamic waterfall. Read about it. Some of this water is pumped all the way to the South Rim, supplying the entire park with fresh water. It also is responsible for the beginning of Bright Angel Creek, which runs adjacent to the North Kaibab Trail from this point all the way to the Colorado River. Shortly after this junction, the pitch of the trail decreases substantially. It still descends a great deal, but more gradually.
We arrived at Manzanita Rest Area, somewhere around 5.0 miles, around 6:20 and took a ten-minute break. Elevation here is 4400’, meaning we had descended about 3840’ over the five miles. We met a guy named Glen from North Carolina hiking with his daughter from Massachusetts. They had passed us on the way down. They left Manzanita ahead of us, then we passed them later in the morning while we walked through Cottonwood Campground at the eight-mile mark. This chance meeting becomes more interesting the next day …
Soon after this is the junction with Ribbon Falls Trail. After this, the trail enters more of a narrow canyon, Bright Angel Canyon, and continues within it all the way to the Colorado River. By itself, this is an amazing canyon that happens to be a canyon with the canyon. It is also known as “The Box,” and I have read that it can be very hot inside “The Box,” but it was fine for us.
When looking down at Bright Angel Canyon from the South Rim, Bright Angel Canyon seems almost insignificant in the scope of things. But it is amazing visually. It also shielded us from the sun for several hours such that we did not walk into sunlight until we reached Phantom Ranch around 10 AM. We had walked either in darkness or shade until that point in time. But once we were in sunlight, it felt hot. When we reached the river, it was about 84 degrees with forecast to reach 91 degrees later in the day. Why did it feel so hot? Not sure, but it often seems, to me, the Sun is stronger out west. Maybe it’s the higher altitude in general.
There were quite a few people at Phantom Ranch. There is a “Canteen” there that offers lemonade and essentials and people were gathered around. “Crowd” seems to apply to the situation we walked into. There were some picnic tables, all occupied and mostly in the sun, little shade. Phantom Ranch has a lodge and cabin accommodations, and Bright Angel Campground is close by. It seemed the Canteen was a congregation place.
We passed the Ranch and the Campground, walking a couple hundred yards to the river. We took a short break at the river. There was a restroom and a water supply there, though very little shade. We had lunch, replenished water, and soaked our heads under the faucet. We left there at 10:20, on to the River Trail, which crosses the Colorado on the “Silver Bridge” and meets the Bright Angel Trail after running along the river for 1.5 miles. One person passed us on this section, a runner moving along with hiking poles. We had been passed by runners while in Bright Angel Canyon, too, though overall we had met very few people going either direction on the trail.
There is a sandy “beach” at the junction, at a place called River Resthouse. Rafts stop here to load or unload individuals on canyon rafting excursions. These raft trips begin at Lees Ferry, about 90 miles upstream. This gives people the option to hike in/out, to join or leave raft trips, though they have to do the eight-mile hike from or to the South Rim. For us, this marked the start of our long ascent. It was around 11AM. We were both kind of glad about starting the climb, as we think of going uphill as easier on the legs than going downhill. Downhill can really beat them up, and it is hard on the skeletal system overall.
Then, about a mile later, came Devil’s Corkscrew, a series of steep switchbacks with no shade. A partial photo of this series is seen below. Suddenly, the heat seemed to become a factor. Our pace slowed. We did not see many people on the trail. The few we did see were resting in some shade, though there was not much shade along the way. We came upon one place where a guy was warning people about a rattlesnake that was only a few feet off the trail. I did not see the snake, but I could hear it very clear. I passed without hesitating to try and obtain a photo.
Slow but steady, we reached Havasupai Gardens, climbing 1300’ in about 3.3 miles. It was around 1PM. We took a ten-minute break there, replenishing water and having a bite to eat. Richie was eating peanut butter sandwiches. I was eating cinnamon-raisin bagels and Cliff bars to compliment my Gatorade and water. There were a few people there, two guys, I’d say in their 50s, who spoke French. They filled their water bottles. Two couples, probably in their 20s, seemed to be on a day hike from the South Rim. Surprisingly, I did not see any water bottles on them.
The rest of the hike was more “slow and steady,” though slow is a relative term. It is 4.5 miles from Havasupai Gardens to the South Rim, where the trail ends (or begins, it depends on your perspective). Those last miles can be broken down in three sections, as there are “rest areas” with water at the 3-mile and 1.5 mile marks. We took brief rests at each of these places. We arrived at the top joyfully at around 3:20 PM. It was hard work, though it was not at all a “death march.” We saw more people as we hiked through these sections. There were some with full backpack gear, who had been overnight in the Canyon and were “hiking out” from one of the campgrounds. There were some who were hiking to one of the campgrounds as well. But most seemed to be day-hikers who had come down to one of the rest areas and then were hiking back out.
That night we stayed at Kachina Lodge, which is right on the rim. The next morning, sore legs and all, we walked down to the Kolb Brothers Studio. It was around 8:30. The Kolbs came to Grand Canyon in the early 1900s and created a business taking photographs of canyon visitors as they descended on the trail. They’d have photos ready for sale when the travelers returned. It proved lucrative. These days, the studio still sits there on the canyon rim, though it is not a working studio. It has some souvenirs and artwork on he top floor. On the bottom floor, there is a collection of recent paintings, done just in the last month in a plein-air competition of sorts. Read about it. The framed paintings are for sale, ranging anywhere from several hundred dollars for smaller ones up to a large one that had a price of $10,000.
I was enjoying the artwork when I turned to walk to another painting. Standing a few feet away was Glen, the guy I had met at Manzanita Rest stop from the previous days hike. We smiled, laughed, and remarked, what are the chances of meeting again here? He and his daughter finished the hike “in the dark,” he said, which would put it sometime after 6:30PM. He said it was a great hike.
As it was for us.
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