One Week in the Canyon – Limping to Lonetree (Day Five)

The morning routine is straightforward.

You wake up, and for a moment have to recall in exactly what world the green roof of the tent has you in this day. Something is inevitably colder than it should be, whether it’s a foot stuck through a zipper or an unlucky ear that wasn’t most recently on the pillow-side of the head.

You lie to yourself that you don’t yet need to pee, that you’ve got some more sleep left in you first. The realization of how chilly it is outside your bag fuels that thought. It creeps into your mind how cold your shoes must be, on whichever side vestibule you left them in overnight, and that they might still be wet.

More than anything, you know you’re sore. You haven’t moved enough yet to test the veracity of said soreness, but you know it’s there – as soon as you’re out of the tent and standing upright for the first time that day, it’ll be there for all to see, like a temporary tattoo written in trail ink.

All of this ran through my head on the morning of day five, as I snuggled into my bag on the muddy bluffs next to Grapevine Creek. Following a fourth day in the Grand Canyon that featured rain, rain, more rain, and rain throughout our nearly 11 mile trek along the Tonto Shelf, the Canyon Gods greeted us with an entire night of non-stop rain, too. It was cold, but not obnoxiously cold, and despite the additional hours it confined me and George to the penalty boxes that were our tents, it did make for some pretty comfortable sleeping weather.

Inevitable soreness, extra hours confined within the tent, the nonstop cool rain, and the mud and wetness that came with any departure of the tent made for an idiotic inevitability that I didn’t process until it was too late to rectify. In my hastiness to get into the tent, to get dry, and to stay warm and dry on the previous evening, I’d neglected to consume the requisite amount of water one needs to stay anywhere close to fully hydrated while in the midst of a fourth full day of heavy exercise within the desert.

I cobbled together the driest combination of warm clothes I could muster, shuffled out of my tent, and instinctively began to chisel away the lactic acid soreness in my entire body the way I do pretty much every morning of my life – a lean right, a lunge left, attempts at popping the back, and a grab of the foot behind my butt to stretch the quad muscles that have been barking since the nearly 5,000 feet of descent back on day one. And when it was my left leg’s turn, I instantly felt a sharp tug of a muscle that was far too tired, far too stressed, and far too dried out at this time of day to be tugged in such a direction.

Right above the left knee, on the outside of my quad, I instantly knew I had properly fucked something up. It tugged back as I stood back on it, not yet tender but with an instant heat to it that told me it would be around to torment me soon. In all my years of running, jumping, kicking, falling, climbing, I had bent and borked my body in ways that had required time to fully get right, but that had always, always been isolated to ankles, lower back, shoulders, and wrists. Now, I was dealing with a self-inflicted pain in an area I’d never dealt with before, with some 25 miles and a 3,500 foot cliff face a bare minimum requirement to get back to a place to fully assess my newfound pain.

It had mercifully stopped raining. As we broke camp and began the slog back towards the cliffs that stood a thousand feet above the Colorado River, the clouds began to break. Through them, our eyes were able to absorb some of the single most tremendous sights the Canyon has in its arsenal, the wet walls of Grapevine Canyon casting a desert lushness to it as the blue skies above broke through.

The rain that had sopped us for the last day had been snow on the higher-up points of the North Rim, the points directly ahead of us as we began our trek toward Lonetree Canyon and camp for night five. It was one of many provoking elements that morning, as my new gait featured a right step lunge followed by a swing of my left leg around to join it.

How much snow was that? I wonder if that storm is headed for the San Juans, where it’s desperately needed. Maybe it’ll even hit the central Colorado mountains, and late February ski season will be a boon. Can I still ski? Did I just wreck my knee in the most embarrassing way possible? How the hell am I going to walk my way out of here? What if the snow that’s on the North Rim is atop the South Rim, too, and our final day up the cliffs at Bright Angel will be all-ice? Why didn’t we just exit out towards Grandview at Horseshoe Mesa when the rain picked up? We’d be out of here, I’d have slept in a bed last night, and my god damn leg would still work.

The kind of good, motivating thoughts to have bouncing ‘round your brain in a place like the Canyon, where a misstep and a tumble can send you off a cliffside like a villain-mobile in a Bond movie car chase. Because of that, in part, it was on day five where I was once again reminded of just how rock solid George is as a hiking partner.

We grew up together, we’d been buddies for our entire lives, but there is a gigantic difference in the definition of good friend and good hiking partner. Prior to this adventure, we’d logged a good number of other trips to help establish our styles and parameters on trails – from a scorching trek into the far-off Maze District of Canyonlands National Park, to near-zero nights in Colorado’s Lost Creek Wilderness, and the tops of over a dozen 14ers. There had been some great days, some tough days, frustrations and conquests, highs and lows for both of us as we trusted our legs and shoulders to carry us to some of the most far-flung offerings Mother Nature has granted us access to in this vast country.

He knew I’d hurt myself pretty good. More than that, he could readily tell I was pissed off to no end for having done it in such stupid fashion, for having not taken better care of myself the night before, and for slowing things down for both of us. He could hear me bitching audibly about it, too. But as is so often the case when you’re logging dozens and dozens of miles in conditions like this, the trail was getting to him a bit, too – even though the first few days went so smoothly, it was going to be about patience and persistence from here on.

It’s an odd thought exercise for me as I look back on this part of the trip almost two full years removed from feeling it. On the one hand, hindsight suggests I maybe should’ve hoped for a hiking partner who was feeling 100% at all times, as that maybe could’ve served as some sort of confidence-boost that someone would bail my limping butt out of a worst-case scenario. If my leg got worse, if I woke up on day six and couldn’t stand, 100% George would simply hike out and tell the Rangers his idiot buddy was waiting for them to scoop him up down at Lonetree.

On the other hand, George dealing with blisters that became so painful he ended up hiking much of day six in sandals became something of a tie that binds for us the rest of the trip. Yeah, the Canyon is a grinder. Yeah, it’s going to throw punches, and they’re going to land. Yeah, we’ve taken our lumps, and we’re not going to walk out of this unscathed like it was easy. Maybe it wouldn’t get so bad that we’d finally reach the top of the South Rim on day seven like the car in Tommy Boy by the time Spade and Farley were done with it, but there’d be evidence that this trek wore on us.

We’d get there. And while the page we were both on wasn’t as newly minted as it was four days prior, we were still on the same one.

Our trek out of Grapevine led us back to the River, and we once again turned west along it. Next up was a side-trip into and around Boulder Creek, a smaller side canyon that featured a ‘creek’ that was dry at that time of year. Still, its dry creek canyon remained, and was another gorgeous feature that included a chance to sit in its bed, soak up some sun for lunch, and lay out our still-soaked gear to finally dry.

By the time we packed up after lunch and came around to the entrance into Lonetree Canyon, the enormity of trip began to hit home.

This was our fifth full day down here on our own. For the entirety of our time on the trail, we’d encountered just two people – one salty Canyon vet heading up the Beamer Trail while in Tanner camp on night one, and a gazelle of a packer who flew by us on day three as if we were swimming upstream. We’d now picked up a knock apiece, but put in a full day on damaged legs that gave us a confidence they wouldn’t put us out of commission altogether. As we rolled into the stream in the back of Lonetree for camp, we’d also completed roughly 50 miles of our ~65 mile journey, a number that for whatever reason seemed to resonate as none had quite before.

I’d never backpacked for 50 miles before this, but now I had. What’s another 15, even on one good leg?

Lonetree camp was simply gorgeous, as George was in the process of explaining in the above picture. The setting sun lit up the North Rim, the clouds above it, and the snow upon it, reminding us just how lucky we’d been to catch only rain in the storm that swept threw – how lucky we’d really been all day on day five, to be banged up but hiking again in clear conditions as opposed to on bad legs and poor terrain.

How lucky we’d been, and were, just to be in this marvel at all, let alone with the entire place to ourselves once more.

Tomorrow we’d have another 10 or so miles to go, though camp that night – our final night in the Canyon – would be at Indian Garden, an established campground with amenities and, unfortunately, humans again. How nice it had been for our time in the Canyon to not see anyone else at all, a thought that’s nearly impossible to comprehend in retrospect given the pandemic that was slowly creeping its way into everyday life while we roamed without access to any news of the world.

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