One Week in the Canyon – Back to the Real World and All of Its Flaws

Dawn at camp in Lonetree Canyon was bittersweet. After lumbering through the Grand Canyon for five days and some fifty miles, we’d reached somewhat of a routine of being out in the middle of nowhere, with nary a soul around to disrupt our plans.

Mother Nature had thrown us a curveball in the form of an all-day spate of rain, but we’d expected to have her as our gamemaster in any and all forms. Today, though, we’d make our trek back towards the section of the Canyon that had the hordes that flock to glimpse this marvel of the world, where the hotels and overlooks of the South Rim loomed over our shoulders.

We’d be heading to Indian Garden to camp that night, too – an established campground with picnic tables and covered shelters and bathrooms and the like. And with people, we assumed, as it sat at the very base of the cliffs of Bright Angel, cliffs we’d be ascending first thing on the morning of day seven if all went according to plan.

Day six had us on another pleasant section of the Tonto Shelf, meandering a thousand or so feet above the Colorado River in weather that had once again turned comfortable. Not quite as warm as when we’d left, but warm enough on the back end of the storm system to make the walk that day feel just fine. Of course, the walking that day was still stinging with most every step, as my left thigh had tightened up overnight and George was still battling a feisty set of blisters on his feet.

It was just about time for lunch when I felt another sensation in my left leg that was wholly unfamiliar at that time. Fortunately, it wasn’t a sharp pain this time, but rather one that reminded me of just how far we’d traveled in such a short few days.

My phone was buzzing in my pocket. As we reached Tip Off junction where the South Kaibab Trail descended to the Tonto Shelf, we stumbled into a small pocket of cell service. My phone, which I’d been keeping charged off and on to use as my camera for the week, suddenly lit up with the texts and emails I’d been sent since taking off down the Tanner Trail on day one, informing me there was once again a real world out there under which I was crawling.

It’s something that I look forward to on most treks, getting away from cell service for a bit. Getting the sensation that you’re a little bit more out there than you can be in most any other place. This time, though, it serves as a reference point larger than those times I’ve stumbled back into service from other treks.

I’ll point out again here that this trip took place over the last week of February, 2020. We sat for a bit at the shelter at Tip Off to enjoy one final lunch – hard salami and cheese in a tortilla for me, again – and I caught myself glancing at a few of the news updates that had landed in my inbox. As it turns out, this coronavirus thing was becoming a thing, with it having spread like wildfire through Italy and there now being a handful of cases popping up in Seattle.

My wife, her sister, their mother, and their aunts were set to convene for a family reunion weekend in Seattle just days away on March 7th, and suddenly that seemed like an epicenter for a burgeoning problem I’d barely heard of just days before.

I managed a quick text exchange with my wife to let her know we were OK, the details about my bum knee mindfully excluded for the time being. We traded a few how-do’s with some day-hikers who were heading down the South Kaibab to Phantom Ranch, found out just how much snow had fallen on the upper rims, and actually had a bit of a refreshing acknowledgment of this false summit-esque experience on our trek.

We weren’t quite done, but we’d made it back to something infinitely more akin to civilization than where we’d been. We’d tackled some of the most remote access in the entirety of the Grand Canyon, and had only a limp to the finish to cap it off. Somewhat mercifully, however, as we moved away from Tip Off and the South Kaibab path, we once again descended back into cell service purgatory – a good thing, really, since it meant I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to read any further into what our world was becoming once we reached Indian Garden, our tent pads, and our choice of vault toilets.

It’s a funny thing, people-watching in a camp like that. For one, it’s a very small number of folks down there at all, with just a couple dozen available sites and not all of them occupied. On top of that, it’s hardly a diverse crowd, as everyone down there is an avid-enough trekker to want to make the journey down. However, it’s still a pretty unique chance to observe the varying levels of fear, dedication, and preparation that make up the folks who camp below the rim.

Some have hiking boots, some just shoes. There were the pair of twentysomething dudes who appeared to be hauling the entirety of the contents of a six bedroom house on their backs (I swear I saw a 26 L cooler flopping around off one). There were gearheads prepped to ice-climb the Matterhorn, the Coleman enthusiasts, my own odd combination of wino and ultralight, trail runners, walking sticks, and so on. We hadn’t made it back to the whole of humanity just yet, but at Indian Garden, we’d made it to a pretty representative roundtable of hikers, packers, and the like once again.

The cliffs loomed above us, too. And since they were the South Rim cliffs, the southern sun didn’t do much to warm the canyon in which we’d set up camp for the night. The rocks had not been warmed, and the winds that night made it perhaps the single coldest night of our trip. George had somehow lost his warm hat on the trek that day, too, and given his bag was not a mummy bag – saving weight on that lack of down, y’all! – he was left trying to keep his face from freezing off for most of the night, a bandana trying fruitlessly to stem the tide of the cold.

My knee hurt like shit that night. The blessing of the vault toilets became a hell when having to pee, as unlike the previous nights where the world away from the creek beds was my peeing oyster, there were other campers, other sites around at Indian Garden. As a man now dedicated to staying as hydrated as possible after it costing me earlier in the trip, that meant a near hourly shuffling of the forty or so yards down the path and back, something the bad knee and the sixty miles I’d put on it that week were more than willing to rib me for over and over again.

Between the pain, the cold, and the proximity to a vehicle that could take us back to creature comforts, we neither slept well nor stayed long. The sun wasn’t going to wake us anyway in that side canyon, and nothing other than getting the blood flowing was going to warm us up, either. Despite the switchback hell that we knew was waiting for us, we set out at first light up the Bright Angel Trail, up the sheer cliffs that stood between us and the first pizzas/cheeseburgers/tacos we could find.

There are times in every trip of length that I do not recall. Many, if not all of those, are on purpose. The ascent up Bright Angel falls mostly into that category, the five-ish miles and few thousand feet up a well-manicured trail on a bad knee not exactly my finest hour.

George, to his credit, was still very much his jovial self, how-doing with the folks on their way down as often as they’d oblige. He’d fill them in on our trip and travails when they inevitably saw our big, dusty backpacks and wondered where the hell these dirtballs had been. He’d point back at me, always a few dozen yards further behind, and I’d grunt and wave when he got to the part about me having borked my knee a few days back. A congrats or you got this would soon follow, and we’d move past them, on a few dozen or hundred paces before the same exchange would pop up again.

It gives me a smile and feels validating now. At the time, I merely wanted to keep my head down, stride long with my right foot, swing my busted left leg around, rinse, and repeat. It was going to suck, I knew, but if I could just keep replicating it, the sucky repetition would dull the mental and physical pain.

In an homage to the pee experience that set back in at Indian Garden, the official exit from the Grand Canyon itself and back on to the South Rim became pee-centric, too. After a week of mostly peeing on dirt in a land of dirt, my first immersion back into the land of the living was a frightful search for a bathroom somewhere, anywhere in which I could pee. They were damn hard to find, too, and the rush of endorphins that should have immediately hit me when I put my two feet back on rim-top ground had to be paused indefinitely as I tried like the dickens to not be That Guy Who Emerged from the Grand Canyon and Pissed Himself.

I found the bathroom, finally. We then found asphalt, and painted lines on roads. We walked through an intersection on a crosswalk, and to a parking lot that vaguely looked familiar. I found a car that looked like mine, dug into the recesses of my dusty backpack to find some keys I hadn’t needed all week, and the headlights flashed when I pressed the button. The engine started, the gears shifted, and just like that our ten-mile-a-day pace became measured in miles-per-hour again.

The fourteen hour drive back to Denver is now a blur. So, too, is much of how life was before we set foot on the Tanner Trail on day one, as by the time the grade-two strain of my left quad really felt good again and my gait returned to normal, the world had spun itself into pandemic and strategic isolation, a scenario that would persist for nearly two years. The biggest trek of my life, the biggest bite I’ve taken and managed to chew, was the final thing I did before COVID, or covid, or Covid turned this world upside down.

There’s certainly a big part of that making my memories of the trip still so vivid. It was in an era of handshakes and hugs and of having zero clue what N95 meant. It was also the most visceral week of my life in so many ways, the sights, sounds, and pains of which I’ll recall for the rest of my days.

From Lipan Point down the Tanner Trail, from Tanner Beach along the Escalante Route to Horseshoe Mesa, on the Tonto Trail to Bright Angel, and up the cliffs that served as our sprint to the finish, we backpacked the heart of the Grand Canyon. I didn’t know if I could do it then. I don’t know if I could do it now.

But, we did it. Maybe I should have brought some more wine.