The Grand Canyon: What Goes Down...

One of the national parks we’d most been looking forward to was the Grand Canyon which, to borrow from The West Wing, is one of the few places in life that when you actually see it, it doesn’t disappoint. We’d planned to hike at least a bit into the canyon, but some last-minute insanity led us to decide on a rim-to-river-and-back hike in one day. Note that the National Park Service has posted in no fewer than 57,632 places that you should not attempt to hike down and up in the same day, emphasizing their point with signs that say “Hiking Down Is Optional, Hiking Back Up Is Not.” But you know, when in Rome…

So the night before we packed up all our layers and Zeynep made us a heaping pile of pasta for “carb-loading,” which I think it just a thing Owenses have made up to excuse eating heaping piles of pasta. When our alarms went off at 5a the temperature outside was a balmy 29 F / -1.5 C, so we were clearly making an excellent decision. We also discovered the hard way that the Grand Canyon just recently became a Dark Sky Park, meaning all of the lights are out all over the park, so even finding the trailhead was a bit of a trick.

Off we went with head lamps illuminating the trail and, more distressingly, the edge of the trail that dropped into a dark abyss. In the picture above our descent looks, thanks to some Google Photos trickery, fairly illuminated, but for the first hour or so we were dependent on the head lamps. For much of this first hour it felt like we were the only people on the planet, until suddenly a trail runner comes flying down past us, and then two more coming up. In recent months we’ve decided that trail runners may actually be a different species.

Once the sun started lighting up the far side of the canyon we were treated to some absolutely amazing views. We continued to have the trail going down largely to ourselves, though started seeing some folks going up from camping at Indian Garden, about halfway down. The trail is nicely maintained, and we made good time to the halfway point. From there, you start to descend into the second and third tiers(?) of canyons, meaning you can’t see the rim and experience a series of false bottoms.

After three and a half hours our knees were starting to complain and the end nowhere in sight… until suddenly there was the Colorado River! A little oddly, there’s actually a small sandy beach near the trail, so we sat for a few minutes to eat some sandwiches and steel ourselves for what was to come.

The way up got off to a good start, with Zeynep setting her usual speedy pace. After 5000 feet / 1500 meters of downhill, going up actually felt pretty darn good.

As we made upward progress, we started seeing more and more would-be day-hikers who also ignored the Park Service’s warnings but didn’t get up quite as early as we did. Most seemed like they’d be fine, but near the end we started to wonder if some of them would make it back up before the sun disappeared behind the canyon rim.

In addition to gorgeous rocks, we also encountered some of the local wildlife (or, as Wikipedia refers to them, “denizens of the desert”). A family of bighorn sheep was using the trail near the canyon rim, and so we stepped aside while they deliberated goring one of us. Ultimately, they got spooked as more hikers congregated and launched themselves off the side of the trail in a way that would be concerning if they weren’t, you know, denizens of the desert.

After seven hours and twenty minutes we stepped off the trail on the canyon rim. Now you may be doing the math on this and thinking, three and a half hours down and less than four hours up doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t, we agree, but this ratio keeps happening to us on big hikes, meaning we’re either very slow going down or very fast going up. We took blitz showers at the campsite, crash-napped for a couple of hours, and then treated ourselves to a lovely evening of more piles of food and fire.

We woke up the next morning to a text from our friends Abe and Liz, who are in the process of moving from DC to LA and happened to be passing near the Grand Canyon, so both parties converged at Flagstaff for an entirely unexpected and entirely wonderful reunion on the road. A fantastic end to a fantastic trip to one of the few places in life that doesn’t disappoint.