The top of Grand Canyon National Park’s Bright Angel Trail sits at some 6,840 feet above sea level, the trailhead and village sitting perched precariously above the shear canyon walls. A hike beginning there that takes you all the way down to the Colorado River at the bottom of the canyon descends over 4,200 feet, for reference, and anyone going down those cliffs is going to eventually have to fight gravity to get back up.
The ascent back up Bright Angel was the final push on my 2020 trek through the Grand Canyon, a 7-day, ~65 mile route that took us down the Tanner Trail to Bright Angel’s east, along the Escalante Route, and finally up and along the Tonto Shelf. With battered knees and exhausted legs, the morning climb to the top was simply punishing, and that was at the tail end of February when the parts of the trail in the shadows were still holding on to thin slivers of ice.
The Grand Canyon can, and will punish you even when the typical heat of a desert summer sun has not yet awoken. When it’s peak heat season down there, the combination of heat and pummeling trails can absolutely be deadly.
Such was sadly the case on Sunday, when a 50 year old hiker from Texas was found unresponsive only 100 feet below the rim. He’d spent the previous night down at Havasupai Gardens over 3,000 feet below, and was attempting to climb back to the trailhead, per the National Park Service press release.
A quick look at the historic temperature readings for Sunday, July 7th at nearby Grand Canyon Village shows that the heat topped out at an overwhelming 113 degrees around the 2 PM time when he was found unresponsive.
Meanwhile, nature’s force was unfortunately on display in Glacier National Park over the weekend, too. A pair of drowning were reported on Saturday, with one – a 26 year old native of India who was visiting the park with friends – occuring after he slipped and fell into a roaring Avalanche Creek. The creek, a tributary of McDonald Creek that later runs into the iconic Lake McDonald, was running ‘at high water level due to snow melt runoff,’ per the NPS press release, so high that park rangers have not been able to enter the gorge to recover the body.
Later that day, an inexperienced 28 year old swimmer from Nepal tragically drowned in Lake McDonald by the Sprague Creek Campground. These two drownings came just weeks after Gillian Tones, a 26 year old Pennsylvania native, drowned after slipping into Virginia Creek and being swept over a series of waterfalls.
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