We passed through Williams on our way into the Grand Canyon.  It claims the last Classic Route 66 town to survive before being bypassed by I-40.  It has neon signs everywhere, and incredible Dad Energy.

We decided to stay within the Grand Canyon National Park in order to maximize our chance of getting either a backcountry camping permit, or a walk-up reservation to Phantom Ranch, a lodge at the bottom of the canyon.  Permits for backcountry camping, or reservations for Phantom Ranch, fill up something like a year in advance. 

Fortunately there are a small number of walk-up permits available, and sometimes folks fail to confirm their stay with Phantom Ranch.  Unfortunately for either you have to get up quite early in order to get your name in.  We put our name for both and, in the meantime, walked a bit of the Grand Canyon rim trail.

Later that afternoon, we got to use our new lightweight frying pan (thanks Harrison and Sara!) to reheat some pizza we'd bought the prior evening -- our room does not have a kitchenette, so we had to improvise.

We were contacted by the backcountry office pretty early with great news -- they have a permit available for us to go hiking down into the canyon!  We're leaving tomorrow morning (Sunday) and returning on Tuesday.  The bottom of the canyon is at about 2,400 feet, which is 4,800 lower than where we are on the south rim -- so the hike is going to be a big drop and a big climb.

We're planning on going down the shorter (steeper) trail, South Kaibab, which is about 7 miles.  We're returning on the Bright Angel Trail, which totals about 9. 5 miles -- but fortunately we're stopping over at the Indian Garden on Monday evening, which is roughly halfway.

Carrie and I spent the evening arranging and packing our backpacks.  They're pretty heavy, but hopefully they will help us not die!

See you all on Tuesday evening -- wish us luck!

It's sort of hard.  We decided to take the recommended route to the bottom:  the South Kaibab trail.  It's a little over seven miles, pretty much all in the sun, a bit steeper than the other south rim trail, and there's no water along the way.  This doesn't exactly make it a nice trail, but since it's supposed to take twice as long to hike up, it's a much better downward trail than an upward trail.  And anyway it's still a very nice trail, and it's breathtaking -- like we're discovering most of the west to be.

We breakfasted on egg burritos and potatoes and hopped a shuttle to the trailhead -- it's about two miles away, and we were able to leave the Rugged Prius nearer to the return trail so that we would not have to walk further after walking forever already.  We never found a place to weigh our packs, but they were sort of heavy, especially with the four-ish liters of water that we packed along.

We took a lot of pictures of the canyons which I will spare you from in the tiny-view of our journal.  We'll see about organizing the full-sized pictures from our trip somewhere nice after we get home.  There's also an option of taking a mule train down (or up), but the advice is that you'll still be pretty sore from riding mules all day so you may as well walk.

There are a few rest stops on the way down the South Kaibab trail, complete with bathrooms.  They are surprisingly clean, and meant that we never had to dig a "cat hole" and practice our aim.  As a ranger put it later, the Grand Canyon hike is one of the more "front-country, back-country trails."  I was very grateful for this, although we still felt reasonably rugged.

We followed the sage advice to rest often -- about ten minutes out of every hour.  We also started each morning at an "agonizingly slow" pace (more advice that Carrie found on the internet) for a half-hour, and stretched before continuing.

The views were incredible.  It's one thing to see the canyon laid out before you at the rim, but it's hard to grasp how big it is until you're down inside of it.  Trekking poles help a ton to save your knees on the descent.

The colors -- rock and vegetation -- change a ton as you descend.  Apparently you walk through several life zones on the way down.  There's a lot of red, brown, and black, but also a ton of greenery.  Also some lizards and an absurd number of ominously-cawing ravens.  Advice about the hike stresses eating, drinking, and resting enough, and notes that "some may finish their Grand Canyon hike and swear to never backpack again -- however many folks, including older people and tiny babies, have made it in and out with no problem.

Eventually the Colorado River came into view.  It seemed like we were very close, but really it was like another hour or so.  There were a good number of folks on the trail, although many fewer after about the halfway point -- where it's recommended that day-trip hikers turn around and head back up.

Near the end of the trail is the Black Bridge, which crosses the Colorado maybe half of a mile before the campsite.  The hiking map warns not to swim in the Colorado because it's wide and swift, and I lost enough family members playing the Oregon Trail game to know not to take chances.

However you can raft and boat the river; we saw some folks putting in as we were finally crossing the Black Bridge.  We set off from the trailhead at around 8:30am and arrive at 2:30pm; a pace a little above one mile per hour.

At the bottom are both the Bright Angel Campground, where we stayed, as well as Phantom Ranch, the only lodge at the bottom of the canyon.  After arriving, we set up camp and wandered around a bit to check out the river and the ranch.  We also saw a mom and baby mule deer crossing another small bridge over the Bright Angel creek on our way to the river.

We got a bit of video of the baby crossing; both Carrie and I feared for its life, but it made it out okay (you can hear the tiny deer bleating for its mom in the video which perhaps we'll find a place to put online someday).  There's a bend where the river calms and we went and put our feet in for a bit.  It's extremely cold, although the air at the bottom of the canyon is about twenty degrees warmer than at the top -- about 90 degrees and 70 degrees when we went down.

Phantom Ranch also sells dinner and runs a small canteen.  Carrie and I were able to snag a meal of vegetable chili (plus salad, cornbread, and a small desert), which was extremely worth it.  We packed plenty of food, but it was nice not to have to heat up our backpacking ramen until the next day.  We fell asleep in our small backpacking tent exhausted after taking some time to watch the stars.  Carrie would lie awake for a few minutes during the night each time she woke up (thankfully not to the amorous sounds of nearby burros as in death valley) to admire the sky -- and saw three or four shooting stars.

Our second day in the Grand Canyon had us hiking about halfway out via the Bright Angel Trail to a campground at Indian Garden.  Bright Angel is the suggested outbound trail because it features potable water, shade, and the mid-way stopping point.  Although we had about five miles to hike, we only had about 1300 feet of elevation that day and so didn't feel too rushed getting out of our camp.  Carrie took some time to walk back over to Phantom Ranch to check it out in the morning light, grab a few more trail snacks, and a postcard.

The first mile-and-a-half of the Bright Angel Trail follows the Colorado River and, although there are some small ups and downs, has almost no total elevation gain.  It starts by crossing the river, and it may have been my favorite hike both for the view and because both of our legs were pretty stiff after the previous day's descent.

The size of the Canyon from the bottom is mind boggling.  It's so hard to understand how large it is from the rim, where you might go "Yeah, I get it -- big Canyon" after an afternoon of sightseeing.  Carrie and I were there for five days and didn't get tired of looking around.  I cannot recommend this hike enough -- and Carrie is already, at this point, planning our trip back.

We saw a ton of these Utah Agave plants, which grow for a long time and then flower as a huge spear and then die.  We also had our second non-lethal sighting of a road runner!

The vegetation became much more lush as we approached Indian Garden, which rests along the Garden Creek.  Carrie walked right by a snake, which scared the absolute bejeezus out of Truman.  We think it was probably a garden snake and probably not a rattlesnake.

We made it after a surprisingly easy hike of about three hours and set up camp.  There was a small pool by the creek to relax in, and Carrie and I made our first ramen noodle backpacking dinner while taking in the scenery.  The noodles were a little bland, but filling -- and much better than the unfortunate tasting chicken rice that we'd also packed but had to eat earlier in the trip.

There's a three-mile roundtrip hike out to Plateau Point, which overlooks the Colorado River and much of the canyon.  Carrie and I decided to race the sun to try to make it out before sunset.  We hiked over pretty quickly and got there with plenty of time.

The moon was just setting along with the sun -- we actually got to watch the moon set right in front of us in the twilight.  I also found out that I do not know how to shoot night photography, but trust me it looked really cool.

A father and daughter from Minnesota were also out on the point, along with a women's hiking group out of Las Vegas.  The hiking group was extremely excited about the outdoors and kept taking pictures much much much too close to the edge of the plateau that we were on -- up on the railing, doing push-ups on the edge of the rocks.  It was fun to watch, but also very scary. 

The father and daughter planned to stay through the sunset to watch the stars, and so Carrie and I decided to hang out for a while as well.  We had a lot of fun chatting, and the sky was incredible.  The Orionid meteor shower was to peak in a couple of days, and we got a bit of an early show with some spectacular shooting stars.  Carrie and I hiked back in the dark, on the lookout for both snakes and scorpions (another hiker had seen a rattlesnake slithering off about an hour earlier) -- but none showed themselves.  Looking around, we were also able to see the headlamps of other hikers off in the distance, climbing Bright Angel Trail back up toward the rim.

Our last hike out was about four and a half miles with 3000 feet of elevation gain, so it was going to be a bit of a long day.  Carrie has long maintained that hiking up is much nicer than hiking down, which I have come to agree is true.  It's more of a workout, but much easier on the knees, balance, and brain (you don't have to watch where you're walking so as to avoid tumbling grandly down the canyon quite as much).  We wanted to get an earlier start and got up with the sun to make coffee and start hiking before the heat of the day.

The view from our campsite was awesome, and we were sad to leave Indian Garden.  On the way out is a sign admonishing folks to stay on the path.  Fortunately Carrie knew where to go.

Fortunately most of the hike up was shaded.  It was pretty tiring, but we took breaks every hour and generally felt okay.  Lots of water, chocolate, meat sticks, fizzing electrolyte tabs, and more water were helpful.  We also got caught behind a mule train with sightseers that stopped every half mile or so to explain what we were looking at (rocks), so we had more opportunities to take a breather and drink some water.

We made it back to the top of the south rim after about four hours, very tired, but very happy.  Our first stop was the food truck where we inhaled a couple of hotdogs and a late-breakfast burrito that the food truck folks tossed in for free (this was our prize for finishing the hike).  We'd gotten a room at the nearby Bright Angel Lodge and relaxed for a while before putting our name in at the El Tovar dining room.

El Tovar is the fancy establishment of the canyon, and has a white-tablecloth dinner service which feels very old-school fancy.  We ate famous french onion soup (recommended by president Obama to the British Prime Minister), caesar salad, and filet mignon.  All-in-all it was a wonderful day and an incredible trip.

I wanted to pause here and say thank you again to everyone who so kindly helped Carrie and I make the trip possible with wonderful backpacking-related gifts.  It would not have been possible without your support, and we're deeply grateful to have been able to experience walking through the Canyon.  I don't have the words to describe what the trip felt like, nor for our gratitude.