Day 47: up to the South Rim

Wind whipped at my tent in the tent, gusting up the drainage from the river. Still, I slept well in my little rock cove, on my slowly deflating pad, under my too-warm-for-Grand-Canyon 10 degree sleeping bag. At some point nothing matters but sleep. I curled half in, half out of the bag and my bones dug into the ground. I woke up enough to know these things but that is all. And then it was morning and I woke up. 

By headlamp I climbed the steep trail out of the drainage and made it to the Kaibab Trail about forty minutes later. The Kaibab trail runs from the South Rim all the way down to the river, crossing the Tonto platform at place called Tipoff (I’m assuming because if you went north on the Kaibab Trail, you would tip off the edge of the Tonto platform into the inner gorge of the canyon, plunging a thousand feet down between metamorphic rocks that are in some cases 2 billion years old, and you would maybe almost be uncomfortable because at the Grand Canyon everything is laid bare and it would feel like you were looking at the earth’s private parts–I don’t know because I went south). Tipoff has a bathroom! All the way down in the Grand Canyon! I had about five miles and 3600 feet of elevation gain to reach the top on a massively overbuilt trail that was so beefy it sometimes looked like you could drive a car down it. It was early and cool. I was thinking about breakfast. I was thinking about Dan. 

Shortly after I started up a small pack of runners came bounding down towards me. I asked if they were heading all the way down the river and back up again. Some were, and others were heading to the river, up to the north rim, back down to the river and then back up to the south rim again. Well, I said, aren’t we all just crazy in our own special ways. I encountered the runners at 5:30 in the morning.  Maybe an hour later I started seeing day hikers and then occasional backpackers, only sporadically at first but eventually I could see a steady flow, a river of humanity, picking its way down the trail from the very top. I passed w mule train (the mules carry loads up and down the canyon for twelve years before retirement–I asked–and though they are roped nose to tail with little more than a foot or two of slack, they don’t mind being so close together while walking down the sometimes-steep trail, though I did see them stepping on eachothers feet, intentional or not). I said Good Morning a thousand times it felt and then I was on top. The easiest climb of the last month and a half, hands down. 

As I climbed, in shorts and my hiking shirt, I got colder as I went up. Usually the reverse is true, that climbing makes you warmer, but the air temperature was plummeting, the wind was picking up, and I didn’t stop until the very crowded top where I ducked into an outhouse and changed into pants and got out my down jacket. I almost needed my gloves. I had a couple miles of paved trail to walk to Grand Canyon Village, winding along the rim and passing full parking lots and overlooks and busloads of people. On the way it started snowing, light flakes only, but I looked on mystified at the weather. I quickly made it to the grocery store with a deli and got in a long line of tourists waiting to order coffees and breakfast sandwiches. I got a breakfast burrito, mostly filled with mashed tater tots but hot and delicious, and a cup of tea and tucked into a small table. I watched the light snow outside turn into a heavy hail, a white-streaked scene of shrieking tourists in t-shirts taking photos of themselves covered in hail stones in the parking lot because, after all, who would believe you got bailed on in the Grand Canyon? 

I’m staying with Li Brannfors while at the South Rim, a long-distance hiker who produces maps for the Pacific Northwest Trail and the Hayduke Trail, among others. I used his maps when I hiked the Pacific Northwest Trail a couple years ago and I’m using his maps for the Hayduke now, and it’s for his maps that I’m collecting all the GPS data on this trail (I did it on the PNT as well). Li works for the Park Service monitoring the effects of fire in the Grand Canyon, so he lives on the South Rim for part of the year. I’m very happy to be meeting him in person, rather than just over email like we’ve done over the years. I passed a bit of time at the grocery store, picking up my boxes from the Post Office next doer and doing a bit of shopping, and then Li came to pick me up. Shower, laundry, food, good conversation. 

Originally I had planned to take a rest day here tomorrow, my last of the trail, and then hike out Sunday morning into the last blissful two weeks, leaving the South Rim on the Tonto Trail. But, some things have fallen in the way, like boulders into a stream that divert the flow. More details to come tomorrow but I’ll be spending the next day deciding on a new plan. 

   
              

Day 46: resting in the canyon

I want to know the names of things. I want to know what to call the small gray birds that float and fight in whips of effort above the chasm dropping away a thousand feet below to the river. I want to know if it is members of the Supai group of rocks that I’m climbing over, whether it’s Acacia that scratched up my wrist so badly that it blistered, what the bush is that smells like curry. I feel I ought to know these things. But you could make a whole universe out of what I don’t know. In fact one exists. You wash yourself in its waters and live on its light. You are it too.  All I don’t know could fit in a nutshell the size of our vast, incomprehensible universe. Down to what is the stiff little green bush that dominates the slopes of the Bright Angel shale, making them appear so green beneath the stark Redwall formation cliffs above. I want to walk in shorts. It’s hot. But the stiff little bush that looks like sage but isn’t has tenderized my legs.

I strove to sleep in this morning, but it was effortful. I didn’t mind the effort. I find I don’t mind most efforts, once I’ve decided to do them. I knew last night that I would sleep in this morning to make this day as fully relaxed as possible. Day was on when I got up but the sun hadn’t yet crested the canyon wall. Last night was the coolest night of sleep I’ve had since entering Grand Canyon, but I could tell by the purity of the blue sky that it would probably be a hot day. No clouds, little breeze. I planned to walk eight miles to a creek, my last water source until the top of the canyon rim at the Kaibab Trailhead tomorrow morning, and spend most of the day by the creek before walking a few miles to camp as close to the Kaibab trail as possible (it’s illegal to camp along the Kaibab trail due to the high use it receives). The eight miles went quickly. I stopped to watch a massive bird glide over the canyon and then rest right on the edge of the cliff my trail was routed along. It stretched its wings and stood in the sun. I sat nearby and we watched each other, trapped in our minds and barely able to imagine the texture of the other. Its bald head and hooked beak gave it away. We all know vultures from cartoons. 

By 10 I was at the creek, a little dazed at the prospect of sitting there for five hours. Most oft waking hours are spent walking. It is the backdrop of my whole day. But I could feel the sun, serious and unobstructed, only gathering strength, and I planned to camp only five miles away. Resting was the only reasonable thing to do. I laid my pack down and sat. I did nothing. Wind blew and shadows moved. Birds sang elaborate and long songs and then fell silent, the only constant noise an insect hum underneath. Eventually I cooked some food and looked at maps for the rest of my route through the Grand Canyon. I read my book in the dappled shade of tree (I don’t know the tree name but I’ll call it friend for now). I drank water, dipping my bottles in the small flowing creek where tadpoles clustered in each pool. I watched one fat tadpole on the cusp of changing, a fat silver belly hinting at the pending frog, struggle in the narrow stream as it ran down a rock chute. The tadpole flopped and writhed. You were never meant to be a tadpole, I wanted to say. This isn’t betrayal. You were always a runway to a frog. 

The afternoon was so fantastic, so rich and full of delights and emptiness, that for a brief time I lost the feeling of being a sojourner and felt as comfortable and content as home can offer. That’s not usually how I feel on this spinning rock, in these lands of frog chorus and soaring birds. I’m often accompanied by a sense that I don’t belong here, by an immutable feeling of loss. I watch the animals and plants busy at the minutae of their lives: digging holes, flitting about, almost mindlessly complacent in their sense of place. I am not like them. I doubt. I anguish. I spend most of my life in the cavernous mind stockpiled with my own history and grievances and desires. I am of this world and yet separate. So that is how I often feel, and often what I seek to understand when I walk for months. But such a sweet and comfortable day. An afternoon of belonging. 

After I left my long afternoon reprieve around 4pm, I had a quick two hours hiking across the Tonto platform to the last possible place I can legally camp. Another group of people are camped in the same drainage and I expect tomorrow I’ll see many more as I climb out of the canyon up to the South Rim. I went up the drainage to set up camp, finding a little rock hole that just barely fit my tent. I would sleep without it but clouds started building this evening and I wouldn’t be surprised if it rained. I finished off some of my food, delighting in the decimated food bag of such insignificant weight so close to resupply, and as the sun is setting and birds and singing in th night I’ve tucked away in my tent and am looking forward to sleep.