One Week in the Canyon – ‘Escalar’ means ‘to climb’

You wake up on the banks of the river. The river runs downstream from your right to your left. Your hike that day takes you left – downstream – where you’ll again camp on water’s edge.

How hard could it really be?

Night one in the canyon quickly turned into an exercise in drinking more white wine than was originally allotted for night one of a six night trip. As if the tip of my brain stem connected directly to the muscles tightening in my upper back and fired a few furious synapses indicating that they sure as hell didn’t want to be carrying that around any longer than necessary.

Believe it or not, excess wine paired with total exhaustion and pristine weather makes for a rather glorious night’s sleep, even when it comes on a beat up old yoga mat. The conditions, I’ll reiterate for purposes that will make sense later, were truly magnificent, to the point where nary a rain fly was used overnight on either tent. The stars, copious as they were, were the only thing that even stood a chance of keeping me awake past 9 PM, and I crashed hard under scenes cast by the Milky Way as the River rumbled past.

George and I woke rather early. Perhaps it’s the hindsight of knowing how I felt waking up most every other morning of the trip that’s jading this memory a bit, but I don’t remember feeling beat up too badly at all on the morning of day two. If anything, the warm sun, the head-dunk in the chilly water, and the cup of instant coffee had me feeling like I could take on the world yet again. Wick 1, wine 0.

As I mentioned at the outset here, there was no rim-to-river drop for us today. We’d found the Colorado and we’d be on it, or at it, for camp again later that night. Along with the knowledge of what we’d pulled off yesterday without crying or dying, I was hit with a sucker-punch of confidence as we broke camp. Tanner was now in our rear-view mirror, and we turned west along the Escalante Route.

The canyon’s South Rim is by far the most visited side. It’s where the fully-paved rim road actually exists, where the visitor center and main ranger station call home, and where the largest markets, lodges, and campgrounds are. While I’m unaware of the master plan used by the original architects in the Department of the Interior, even one glance at the map pretty well gives the gist away:

You can’t really see what lies on the north side of the Colorado River from the North Rim, and that’s where all the stunningly beautiful features stand. Don’t funnel people to the glorious geological features, send them to where the views of said features are.

As we meandered down the south side of the River towards Cardenas Canyon and Unkar Rapid, it became very evident that our eyes would be drawn to our right – to the north – all day.

That’s Vishnu Temple over my left shoulder, with The Tabernacle and Solomon Temple over my right. At over 7,600 feet, Vishnu is one of the highest points within Grand Canyon National Park, a between-the-rims peak that reminds you that the entire landscape from river-level looks much the way the Rockies look from, say, the Arkansas River. Or how volcanic islands must look like from the sea floor.

Barely an hour into what we knew would be a pretty full day, we were watching the Canyon swing open its doors and show us its stock. It was at that moment where another, more pressing revelation hit me – we were going up.

As we rounded the bend at Unkar Rapid, the trail followed the River as it turned south, and the fifteen-ish years I’d spent studying Spanish began to bubble up in my brain. Escalante is derived from the verb escalar, which means to climb. Taking my eyes off the temple peaks to the north for a minute, a glance at the map confirmed we definitely tuvemos que escalar este día, with the nature of our next five days beginning to have a face put to its name.

If you step back and think about canyons in general, the basic concept is pretty straightforward. Water, as it is wont to do, finds its low point and moves anything and everything in front of it to follow gravity, eroding its path in the process. The more water, the more erosion, and the main cut – the river and canyon bottom, eventually – becomes the exit route. To get there, though, all the water that falls around that biggest of ditches has to get to the main cut somehow along the way, and tributaries form as creeks serve as drainages carrying every last drop to the river-highway at the bottom.

Those tributaries erode, too, just not as fast as the river. As you walk the riverside, tributaries have slowly cut through the walls of the canyon rims and occasionally slam perpendicularly into your route as the crow flies. Whereas the water from the tributaries has cut its way down thousands of feet to ultimately meet river level, the walls through which they cut remain, and with neither a boat to take the river around them nor wings to fly across them, that leaves your feet to take you up, around, and across them at their least-eroded point. That’s often miles and miles of working back up side-canyons before you find a passable point. Alas, we humans are no crows.

This was our first of no fewer than eight side-canyon detours on our weeklong trip. It also proved to be one of the most grueling, as it sent us up some ~2,000 feet above river level, all of which came in the double-whammy form of exposure – exposure in the sense of ‘huge cliffs you could fall the fuck off of’ as well as ‘it’s the desert, it’s sunny, there are no trees and no shade.’

We were hot. We were running low on water, having loaded up on three liters before pushing away from the River and mostly downed those in short order as we baked in the sun. The ~9.5 miles the map suggested we had on the day was beginning to feel underestimated, and the inverse of the ‘false summit’ syndrome you often have when trekking in the mountains had teased us at least twice – twice we thought we’d reached the point where we were to descend back to the River, only to find another outcrop of rock to circumnavigate.

Dumb as I can often be, I did know two firm truths at that point. I knew we weren’t lost, and I knew the location of where we were set to camp that night (if we ever made it) was supposed to be perhaps the single coolest canyon camp around. As the legs got woozy and the dehydration brain-farts set in, it was that knowledge – and religiously using a pace count – that kept me going.

At around 1:30 PM, we finally rounded one last bend and began to dive into the Escalante Creek drainage, with the creek’s confluence with the River to be our camp for the night. The creek was mostly dry at that time of year, naturally, but its bed still served as our path to water, to rest, to where our legs and shoulders had reprieve for the remainder of the day.

While the descent still required our legs to be nimble for another couple thousand feet, we eventually reached camp on the beach. Sure enough, it lived up to its reputation as being absolutely gorgeous – so gorgeous that not even a pair of mangled, blistered feet could ruin the view.

We knew how tired we were, how far we’d come. We were also well aware of what still lay ahead, the Papago Wall and slide looming tomorrow as a feature we’d had on our minds for months in preparation for this trip. With a pristine 70 degree day and all the work it took to find this nook of a beach on the Colorado River, though, it was impossible not to savor every last second of sunlight as if the planets and galaxies had all aligned in our favor that day in a way they might never again.

And there was still some wine.

You can read Part Three of this weeklong trek through the Grand Canyon’s Escalante Route here.