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Published: October 21st 2009
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Fires around Grand Canyon
It was crazy, the whole National Forest around the canyon was filled with small, random fires like this After a day of exploring the Painted Desert, Meteor Crater, and other areas of Arizona wilderness, we woke up and headed to the Grand Canyon. We had both been looking forward to reaching this part of our trip as it was a major item on our list of to-do’s. This was a place both of us had always wanted to see and it was thrilling to finally have the opportunity. We planned on taking our backpacks down to the bottom and camp on the banks of the Colorado River. I had been keeping the wounds on my ankles and back clean with Neosporin and new gauze everyday and hoped they were up to the task.
As we drove into the park, wildfires were burning throughout the woods all around the outside of the canyon. It was so dry and the heat was so intense that logs were going up in flames all around us. When we got to the main park area, we found out we had to reserve campsites. After a lucky cancelation, we were able to get one night in the Bright Angel Campground and another night in Cremation Creek. It was around two in the afternoon now
Going down the south Kaibab
I would have a completely different expression on my face after coming back up... so we hurried to the market to buy some food, then quickly secured and double checked our gear, and then hitched a ride to the rim with an old man. He kept saying how amazed he was with people who make the whole hike down and didn’t know where we train for such a severe hike… “People don’t just start out with hiking the Grand Canyon”. Wait… they don’t?
We had no idea what we were in for. When we got the edge of the canyon my entire body tingled. Never in a million years would I have imagined there could be something this big! It was absolutely incredible, something that no words could ever fully describe. I wanted to climb it. We took the South Kaibab trailhead and descended down its strenuous 4,780 feet of elevation in 7 miles. It began to get dark very quick on our way down. As the sun set it would cast shadows for what seemed like miles. We were scaling down the side of Grand Canyon with about 40 pounds of gear and it was getting dark, very dark. The sound of the Colorado kept tricking us into thinking we were closer
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walking off into the great unknown... than we were, the pure power of it could be heard from miles away. By the time were nearing the end of the trail it was pitch black. The moon light couldn’t reach us on the side of the rocks that we were on and the only light we had was from a lighter.
We ended not being able to find out campsite and ended up sleeping right on the side of the Grand Canyon. We found a ledge just big enough to hold the tent and fell asleep; hoping neither of us would roll off the edge and bring the whole tent down with them. A few hours later we were woken up by a group of Indians riding mules to the top. We heard their footsteps and tried to pack up as quickly as possible to clear the way for them. They told us how to get to the camp… we had walked right past it in the dark but couldn’t see it.
Waking up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon was like waking up in a fairytale world—a 115 degree Fahrenheit fairytale world. The whole way down was breathtakingly beautiful and the bright aqua
Good morning
This is what we woke up to when we walked out of our tent. colored river below seemed like an oasis from heaven. But actually being at the center of it all, looking straight up and still not being able to see the ridge, realizing we just hiked to the bottom of one of nature’s greatest creations, it felt magical. It was a feeling of insignificance and liberation. We climbed rocks and read books, climbed rocks and wrote, climbed rocks and just sat, and climbed rocks just to climb. We swam in the fifty-degree Colorado River, which in the 120 degree heat felt amazing. We would swim out to a rock about twenty feet off the bank and climb up on it to just bask in the glory around us. By the time we would get on top of the rock we would already be dried off from the sun!
After our two nights at the bottom of the Grand Canyon we felt like we had gotten our fix and wanted to move on to the beaches of Southern California. Wanting to get the most out our days, we planned the hike up for late afternoon… when it would cool down to around one hundred. On the way down we realized we didn’t
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the view from our rock in the Colorado bring nearly enough water or food. We barely made it to the bottom on my 2 liter camelback and we knew going back up was going to be a challenge. I managed to snag a couple handfuls of honey packets from Phantom Ranch at the bottom and we spent a whole six hours before we left sitting in Bright Angle Creek drinking as much water as we could to make sure we at least left fully hydrated.
Hiking up the Grand Canyon was the most difficult thing I had ever done. My body had never hurt so badly. My knees felt like knives were being driven through them, I was dehydrated, I had the most intense, deep leg burn I had ever experienced for seven straight hours, it was hell. We had to ration our water to about 1 drink every thirty minutes and spent the last two hours eating jelly for energy. On the Kaibab trail shade is sparse and you’re lucky if you fit more than an arm and leg in it. When we finally reached top, nearly hallucinating from exhaustion and dehydration, we met an extremely nice couple (whose names I was in no state of
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sitting on our rock after swimming awareness to remember) who had just finished a day hike and they blessed us with power bars, fruit, trail mix, and a ride back to our car. We drove to McDonalds, went through the drive through, and spent the next 12 hours moaning as we tried to sleep off the pain.
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