One Week in the Canyon - Riding Gravity on the Tanner Trail

Perhaps the wine was a bit much.

I have uttered that to myself more times than I’d care to admit as the mid-morning sun creeps towards eye-level in the sky. This was once again an instance where I began to question decisions I’d made the night before. This time, those familiar words spun a different story.

The wine hadn’t given me a piercing headache. The wine was grinding my knees to a pulp.

That cool February morning had me perched on the side of cliff after cliff, riding gravity with a handbrake down the depths of Tanner Canyon. Nearly five-thousand feet of descent was on the docket for us over our nearly ten mile trek that day, with our lives for the next full week slung on our backs and shoulders for a sixty-five mile grind through the heart of the Grand Canyon set to follow.

I had chosen wine as my vice of the week. Three liters of wine, an amount that on its own would’ve served as a gluttonous hindrance but instead was the icing on a backpack cake that was already well past thirty pounds. After meticulously packing every other article with every last ounce weighed theoretically and physically, I stuffed in two bladders of dry white wine, knowing that it’d be dark early and quiet always and taking the edge off at the end of the day might be nice after, y’know, trying not to fall off the edge all day. Fuel for staring at the deepest night skies this hemisphere had to offer and howling loudly at the moon.

I was in perhaps the best shape of my adult life, admittedly. My buddy George, the brains behind this expedition, had pulled this permit months ago, one that would allow us to descend along the Tanner Trail to the Colorado River, follow the Escalante Route back west along it, and climb back up to the Tonto Shelf towards the Bright Angel exit. So, there was ample time to prep as best I could – in theory. The thing about being based in Colorado, though, is that so often the big trips with the big packs involve heading uphill with the heaviest of stuff at the outset and downhill with just the dregs at week’s end, and the Grand Canyon serves as the perfect inverse.

Gravity, as it turns out, is a hell of a concept. We’d be fighting against it this time with the last dregs of our legs, instead.

The River came into view for good around mile seven, at which point the descent became a bit more gradual but every bit as rocky as before. Jelly legs made me feel as if each step was being taken on roller skates, and I struggled to hit my targets with the weight distributed the way it was supposed to be. Walking, something I’d done effortlessly since I was ten months old, was now untrained, and I was trying to figure it out on the fly with a lush backpack pushing my ass downhill.

That’s where the mental aspect of this entire trip began to filter through, one my ‘perhaps the best shape of my adult life’ comment did not address. There were still miles to go on day one of this seven day trek, and I was already measuring each and every single step I took to avoid pitfall and injury. This was a grind the likes of which I had never experienced, and I was well aware it would be before step one, but some experiences just have to kick you square in the shins for you to truly understand them.

After all, one quick glance over my shoulder at the shortest route back to the car at that point was just as demoralizing. At best, there was the known of the ~5,000 feet we’d just descended. At worst, there was a fifty-plus mile haul before an unknown replica of similar, perhaps worse terrain. We were, as they say, officially in it.

It was the roar that became my linchpin. Sights and smells have long had that rejuvenative ability, the first whiff of coffee on a cold morning and the like, but I don’t recall a noise sharpening my focus that way ever before. The Colorado River, lifeblood of the American Southwest, has been cutting its way through Arizona like a buzzsaw through hot butter for eons, itself riding gravity towards golf course sprinklers and Bellagio fountains down the way. To do so it must physically drop, and the rapids where it funnels in the canyon slam water molecules together with a fervor rarely matched elsewhere, especially with mile-high sandstone walls serving as their sound-reflecting backdrop.

Tanner Rapid is one of the first big funnels downriver from the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers, and it just so happens to power through the canyon next to a sandy beach that was where we were set to camp for the night. So, the sound of the water was calling me home, the roar getting gradually louder with every stumbled step taken its way. The less I could hear myself groan, the closer I was to home, both for that day and for good.

Tanner Beach has seen its fair share of tents and cots. For one, it’s perfectly located at the outset of the series of rapids that run through the main canyon, and is a stage-setter for what’s yet to come for the hundreds of folks who raft the river through it each season. Whether coming from the Little Colorado Gorge that forms the south end of the Navajo Nation lands, or on the Colorado itself through Marble Canyon, a blast through Tanner Rapid and the beach behind it serves as a great way to wrap an entry day into the larger canyon beyond. The same holds true for those backpacking it from east to west, and when we reached it…’elated’ seems like an understatement of the emotion here.

The view downriver from the beach is a truly spectacular perk, too. Soft, sandy tent spots nestled in the brush, and while the same boulders that shake the rapids into rafter’s dreams stir up some incredibly silty river water, there is ample water nonetheless – and with access, something that’s far from a given in some places with thousand-foot drops. Somewhat surprisingly, though, we had the entire site to ourselves for the night, perhaps due to our willingness to risk the conditions that could have been around that early in February – conditions, I’ll add, that had been simply brilliant all day, with the temperatures in the mid 60s with clouds few and far between.

While the air outside was bordering on the warm side, the water was not. Thank god, it was not, as it was set to serve as the next best thing to ice packs for my already barking feet, ankles, and knees. Plopped down on the water’s edge in the tiniest of protected inlets, I sank my legs into water that had just previously sat at the frigid bottom of Lake Powell upstream, it only making its way to me when the huge doors of the Glen Canyon Dam allowed.

Tent pitched, camp assembled, and legs getting their first chance at recovery after a grind of a day unlike any I’d ever had before. And for the first time all day, one particular thought entered my mind –

Perhaps the wine wasn’t too much after all.

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