6 Painful Lessons I Learned By Hiking the Grand Canyon

Things I’ve learned at GCNP:

Even at 24 years old, you need to condition for some events (e.g. a one-day R2R2R).

The above becomes increasingly true each subsequent decade.

It is less tiring to wet one’s shirt and hat with a cup of stream water than with a cup of sweat.

A men’s dress shirt works well in the desert.

Trim your nails several days before a death march.

A $20 bill weighs a lot less than the lemonade and granola bars it can buy.

Large German women have a high insulation value (that episode wasn’t nearly as risqué as you are imagining).

Valerie,

It was my first time at the Grand Canyon in 1978.  My friend and I wore our usual hiking clothes – cotton shorts and t-shirts.  A bota bag was actually one of our water containers (REI sold them as serious hiking gear, back then).  Got down to the River easily enough (it is downhill the whole way!), and then started back.  It was 105F in the shade.  Except there wasn’t any shade.  And you know how additional heat radiants at you from the rocks.  While Mark was theoretically in better shape than me (cross-country runner, could do a one-armed pull-up, etc) he’d had various mishaps on our previous trips (injuries requiring sutures, heat-stress, fainting, hypothermia, altitude sickness, broken bones, evacuation from a cave, etc), at least I got to practice a lot of my first aid.

About 2 miles up from the river, his conversation changed, his mood darkened and he became less responsive.  Cool skin, clammy look = heat exhaustion.  The cotton shirt was helpful (as was the bota bag) because after letting him cool down in a bit of shade, I had him hike in front of me as I kept him wetted down by squirting him with water from the bota bag.  Okay, fine.  Through Indian Gardens.

The sky started to cloud up, which seemed good, since it had been such a hot day.  The wind was from the south so we had little warning of what was getting blown over us.  The wind picked up and a heavy downpour started.  And continued.  For a long time.  The water would build up on each switchback to be 6 inches deep at the end of that switchback where it all fly off the end, only to build up again on the next switchback.  We were instantly soaked and cooling off quickly, huddled with other tourists in the slightly concave spots we could find along the trail cuts.  Being skinny 17-year-olds, we wriggled to the back of the cluster of people where it was a little less windy and where the large German tourists were providing somewhat of a wind block.

But even there, we kept getting colder and it seemed we might as well run up the trail – we couldn’t be any wetter, and the exercise might warm us a bit.  There were boulders getting washed out and tumbling thousands of feet down the canyon – you could hear them crashing down and the echoes from that, buy I couldn’t localize where the sounds were coming from.  If we stayed close to the hillside, maybe we wouldn’t get hit by anything and while it was almost deep enough for them, there probably weren’t sharks in the water on the trail.  And then it started to hail.

So we went for it and ran the last 2 miles to the Rim.  We’d dodge under cascades of muddy water plus rocks and leaves that were shooting over the trail.  Just as we got to the Rim, it all stopped, the sun came out and there was probably a damn rainbow on the horizon.  All the tourists in plaid pants and white leather shoes came out of the art galleries and ice cream stand as we’re still looking like drowned rats with sticks and leaves in our hair.  We went straight to the coin showers and showered first in our clothes – they were that dirty; changed, camped that night, and drove home through Death Valley the next day (120F – a PB for me and that Subaru Brat didn’t have A/C).

I remember thinking at the time, “How can this place be 20 million years old, if this happens when it rains – it wouldn’t last that long!” but it was an exceptional event – for hours afterwards, they were evacuating hikers AND MULES by helicopter!  It took several years to repair the trail damage from that afternoon.

That trip more than any other is why I now always hike with a trash bag because I haven’t found a cheaper, lighter, more compact way to add warmth if the weather turns on you.

Great story, David!!!!  Thank you for sharing it.   :^D

AZ can have some shocking storms, the fury of which often surprise people.  I was near the bottom of GC one time when I heard/saw a large piece of sandstone cliff fall (sunny day, little wind).  It was a very eerie feeling, especially knowing that you’d be trekking next to that stuff for hours the following day.