2005-07-02 Dam Tour 2005-07-03 Cedar Breaks and Bryce Canyon 2005-07-04 Red Canyon and Grand Canyon 2005-07-05 North Kaibab Trail 2005-07-06 Virgin River Narrows 2005-07-07 Zion Canyon and Gooseberry Mesa 2005-07-08 Water Canyon 2005-07-09 Red Rock Canyon

Day 4 (Tuesday, 7/5/2005)

The North Rim, owing to its higher elevation, is generally much cooler than the South Rim, and I enjoyed perfect sleeping weather as the crisp 50-degree air sidled past the curtains, ineffective sentries against the night.  The pocket alarm's tinny birdsong rudely interrupted an odd dream in which I was John Wesley Powell rafting down the Colorado on a flotilla of inner tubes accompanied by half the cast of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer."  6:30 ... too frickin' early.  Arizona doesn't observe Daylight Savings, so it was already quite light out.  I got dressed, filled my pack with water and provisions for the day, and strolled down to the rim to watch the morning light creep into the Transept before breakfast.

Less than an hour later, we were assembled at the North Kaibab Trailhead, five miles up the road from the lodge, ready to begin our day's descent.  Getting an early start on the descent was important because, while it would stay relatively cool on the rim, temperatures down where we would be hiking would easily approach triple digits by early afternoon.  And in the canyon, what goes down must come up, so we would be ascending back to the rim right as the heat of the day set in.  Hundreds of people every year have to be rescued from the depths of Grand Canyon because they forget that hiking the canyon is like climbing a mountain in reverse.  The canyon is a cruel temptress, luring the unwitting who press forward into the abyss not realizing that every step forward requires two steps to get back.  The canyon exacts its toll in sweat at the end of the hike when you're the most tired and the summer temperatures are beginning to soar.  The North Kaibab is a well-traveled trail, and there are potable water filling stations every few miles between the rim and Cottonwood Campground.  The park service even sends out volunteers to hike up and down the trail making sure everyone is OK.  And yet, heat exhaustion is still the #1 cause of preventable death in the canyon.  A man in his fifties had died just a week prior to our arrival, most likely due to heat-induced cardiac arrest, while trying to hike river-to-rim with his son in one day.  Our guides were able to avert a similar disaster, stopping a man at Supai Tunnel who was going to try to hike all the way to the river and up the South Rim in one day carrying only a 16-ounce Diet Coke bottle full of water.

Indians and prospectors had used Bright Angel Canyon for centuries to travel from the North Rim to the river.  But the current route of the North Kaibab Trail traces back to the turn of the 20th Century, when winter trapped Francois Matthes and his USGS survey party on the rim and they needed a quick route south to beat the oncoming storms.  Improvements began to the trail soon after the Grand Canyon achieved national park status in 1919, with the bulk of trail work being done by the CCC during the Great Depression.  The North Kaibab descends nearly 6000 feet to the river over 14 trail miles, passing through Roaring Springs Canyon (a box canyon) and then following the course of Bright Angel Fault the remaining distance down to river level.  To this day, it remains the only established route between the North Rim and the river.

The trail switches back down the head of the box canyon and passes through Supai Tunnel at mile 1.8, 1400 feet down from the rim.  The tunnel was dynamited out of an outcropping in the red siltstone by the CCC during their Depression-era work on the trail.  Continuing down, the North Kaibab passes over Redwall Bridge, another piece of CCC construction, 3 miles from and 2200 feet below the rim.  The bridge spans Roaring Springs Canyon and is named for the Redwall Limestone, a 330-million-year-old ancient inland seabed whose surface is really more grey than red due to oxidation.  As the trail continues down the opposite side of the canyon, it passes between a large spire (the "Eye of the Needle") and the cliff wall and enters the "meat and potatoes" of the gorge, where the CCC has carved out a 3-foot-wide ledge into the cliff face with a rather terrifying drop to one side.  This ledge trail gradually descends and then finds a more gentle slope down which to switch back on its way to Roaring Springs, located at mile 5 and 3000 feet below the rim.  Roaring Springs, a torrential waterfall that emerges from the side of the cliff at the confluence of Roaring Springs and Bright Angel Canyons, generates almost all of the continuous flow in Bright Angel Creek and also serves as the primary water source for both the North and South Rims.  Getting down to the Springs requires a fairly hard core day hike, particularly in the summer, so I wasn't counting on being able to see them.

We started off down the trail at about the same time as the first mule tour of the day, and we'd play leapfrog with the mules several times during the morning until we got past Supai Tunnel.  Apart from a photo stop at Coconino Overlook and a water stop at Supai Tunnel, we otherwise kept a fairly steady pace down to the Redwall Bridge.  When we arrived at the bridge, there was a family of backpackers resting in the shade of an outcropping, and the father noticed that I was wearing an MS150 T-shirt and commented that he and his family were from Houston and had done the same ride.  Then he said I looked familiar and asked me if I had ever worked for Landmark Graphics, which of course I had up until seven months prior.  It turns out that he was a colleague from Landmark's Houston office, and he had seen some of my talks at conferences but had never met me face to face.  And even more bizarrely, I would run into him two more times that week, at the Zion Canyon Visitor's Center and halfway up the Angel's Landing Trail.

The rest of the group decided to turn around at the bridge, but I wanted to at least go as far as the Eye of the Needle, so Mark and I continued down the trail.  But unbeknownst to us, never having seen the Eye of the Needle and not knowing what to look for, we blew right past it.  We started to realize our error as we noticed a big waterfall in the canyon directly below that looked suspiciously like a spring and sounded suspiciously like it was roaring.  So we figured that now would be a good time to turn around.  There was very little shade hiking along the sheer cliff walls in this part of the gorge, but Mark and I found a convenient rock outcropping under which to have our lunch before we continued the slog back up the hill.  Hiking back up to the rim from our turnaround point was the rough equivalent in elevation and distance to hikes I've done before, such as Emory Peak in Big Bend and Amphitheatre Lake in the Tetons, but the difference here was that I had already hiked five miles before I began the ascent, and it was getting powerful warm down there.  It wasn't the most difficult day hike I've ever done, but it was for sure in the top 10.  Mark and I felt the burn as we retraced our steps back up toward the trailhead, making only one significant stop at Supai Tunnel to refill our water again.  We arrived back at the trailhead around 2 PM and discovered that we were only about 15 minutes behind the rest of the group.

Following a much-needed shower and siesta back at the roost, our guides had another surprise in store for us.  We loaded up the van around 6 PM and made the 20-minute drive north to Point Imperial, the highest point in the park.  Point Imperial is also the point at which the North Rim is farthest away from the river and the point at which the elevation difference between North and South Rims is at its most pronounced (2600 feet of difference.)   Opposite the point, where the South Rim is broken by the Little Colorado River Gorge, the canyon walls descend abruptly from the Marble Platform and the Painted Desert to the river below in less than one linear mile.  But on the opposite side of the river, the canyon floor ascends gradually over 10 miles up to Point Imperial, broken by numerous buttes and spires along the way.

While Chuck & Mark grilled up some tasty vittles, the rest of us stared in awe as the setting sun caught the upper reaches of the canyon, the Vermillion Cliffs, and Lee's Ferry to the east and set them ablaze.  As it set further, the haze from the wildfires to the south began to glow orange and purple, punctuated by O'Leary, Humphreys, and Kendrick Peaks, barely visible on the horizon.  Our last day at Grand Canyon was going out with a bang.