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| 2A: | 2006 May 7-8 | Phantom Ranch |
| 2B: | 2006 May 12 | The Adam Tour |
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| 2A: | 2006 May 7-8 | Phantom Ranch |
| 2B: | 2006 May 12 | The Adam Tour |
Here's another The-Adam flying-adventure page,
another serious hike at the Grand-Canyon,
another trip with my neighbor, Greg,
and my tour-guide efforts as host for three guests,
co-workers coming to an Arizona meeting from
our German offices.
At least this Grand-Canyon page on my flying-adventure list has some actual flying in it. My previous Grand Canyon trip didn't have any actual flying, but I have flown over the Canyon enough times to include that flying in my write-up.
What makes this trip more fun than a "usual" web page on hiking the Grand Canyon is that I managed to make two trips to Grand Canyon National Park in one week, a Sunday-Monday trip by car to Phantom Ranch and then a Friday trip by airplane with our company guests.
Like last time,
we went down the 10.6 Km (6.6 mile) South Kaibab trail,
a descent from 7200 feet (2400 meters, 790 millibars)
to 2400 feet (730 meters, 930 millibars).
South Kaibab is a big-vista-view experience
starting with Panorama Point after a mile (1500 meters).
(The Grand Canyon National Park newspaper
describes this as "Ooh Aah Point.")
There is little shade and no water on the way,
so we prefer to take this trail down rather than up.
A friend at work who has hiked the Canyon a lot
gave me a wonderful bit of hiking-technique advice.
He said the way to last a long time on a canyon hike
is to descend on toes and climb on heels when practical.
The usual technique is to come pounding down on the heels
and the to climb stair-like on the balls of the feet.
This gets fatiguing after a couple of hours.
Whatever I did in following my friends advice
or just being fitter and more experienced at hiking,
I felt a lot better this time when we got to Phantom Rance,
good enough to go for a 10-Km (six-mile) run
up Bright Angel Creek along the North Kaibab trail,
three miles out and back.
This part along the creek has only modest elevation change.
Greg had a chest cold, so he wasn't moving particularly fast.
He's the proverbial tortoise,
or the post-modern EverReady bunny,
able to keep going and going and going.
With several stops to enjoy the scenery
and three to refill our water supplied,
we took nine and a half hours to climb the whole way.
Greg's routine is down South Kaibab and up Bright Angel.
It seems to work well.
South Kaibab is short and steep with little shade,
good for going down while catching the morning sun.
Bright Angel is longer and gentler in grade
with shelter from the sun,
the perfect trail for ascending.
Also, the more-expansive views of South Kaibab
makes me prefer to be descending, facing the canyon.
If we were going to be good hosts,
then somebody from our office was going to have to volunteer
to take our eager, energetic, enthusiastic guests
to spend a day in one of the most wonderful places
on our planet.
It's a tough job and, with a heavy heart,
I was willing to make the sacrifice.
Not only am I, myself, eager, energetic, and enthusiastic
about the Grand Canyon,
I have also been there recently,
as in four days before our trip together.
As for the other three guests,
I suggested I could fly them from Flagstaff
(FLG)
to and over the Grand Canyon
landing at Grand Canyon Airport
(GCN).
The two long-hike fellows would drive the rental car
to Bright Angel Lodge,
we would take a taxi from GCN to the lodge
and get the keys from the manager at the front desk.
Once we have the car, we can do whatever we want for the day.
I suggested
hiking a mile or two down the Bright Angel trail,
having lunch at the lodge restaurant,
taking the Hermits Rest tour bus
to the vista-viewpoints in the afternoon,
and maybe seeing our two brave hikers
before I'm driven back to GCN to fly home
to Phoenix Deer Valley Airport
(DVT).
Except for not seeing the two hikers before I left,
this is exactly what we did.
I found out later the intrepid duo
returned later that day, safe and sound and tired.
I feel
the combination of flying over the Canyon
and then seeing it up close
is richer than either experience by itself.
My passengers told others about their trip
who relayed their enthusiasm to me.
There is one downside of flying into Grand Canyon Airport
(GCN)
and that is the taxicab service.
The last weekend the folks at Bright Angel Lodge
were concerned that our taxi might not show up,
they sometimes go to the wrong place or just plain forget,
and that seems to be what happened after we landed.
I was even foresightful enough to put in the taxi request
immediately after landing
and it didn't help.
The lady at the airport information desk was terrific and,
after the taxi company gave her a hard time,
offered us a ride to Bright Angel Lodge.
I realize taxi service in a place like this
isn't going to have the immediacy of hailing a cab
in New York City,
but Canyon tourists have come a long way
and often don't have a lot of extra time.
Having taxis show up an hour late,
or not show up at all,
is a real bummer.
The stroll down was fun and we took lots of pictures.
It takes about five or ten minutes of walking down the trail
to get the idea of how large the Grand Canyon is.
It's a funny thing how just seeing it from a viewpoint
is less impressive than seeing it from a moving view while hiking.
The Bright Angel trail is the most popular place
in the Grand Canyon so there was a continuous stream of people,
most of whom were pleasant and not too loud.
What sounded like a dozen fidgity kids behind us
turned out to be a huge group of 160 well-behaved boy scouts
as they passed us.
I have to admit the last mile and a half of Bright Angel
is a whole lot easier without having hiked the previous nine miles
from Phantom Ranch as I had done four days earlier.
Even so, I was ready for lunch when we got back to the Lodge.
Would the rim views have been better with more hiking experience?
Of course,
but this gave my guests an overall Canyon experience in a day
that they could remember and that would encourage them to come back
to spend more time there.
I gave the all the appropriate scare lectures about
dehydration
and serious effort and all that.
I felt their status as
athletes
heightened their risk as there's
a pride in being physically fit.
"I can do this
and no silly guide book warning is going to keep me from doing it."
At the end of the day,
my guests enjoyed the Grand Canyon
in different and satisfying ways.
Going to the Grand Canyon twice in the same week
and having to entertain three
energetic, enthusiastic, and eager guests
in one of the most beautiful and wonderful places in the world.
It's a tough job, but I was up for the challenge.
2006 May 7: Hiking Down South Kaibab to Phantom Ranch
2006 May 7: Hiking Down South Kaibab to Phantom Ranch
This is Phantom-Ranch trip number 29 for Greg.
I don't know what he does to get reservations,
as most people have to try for years,
but he calls the right people at the right time
to get us reservations.
Part of his secret is that we're willing to take
just about any Canyon-hike date they have available.
This is only my second trip with Greg
and I'm looking forward to more Grand-Canyon hikes with him.
After the first mile to Panorama Point
The first half of the South Kaibab trail
was in really terrible condition
with deep ruts between the trail-supporting logs.
The park and the mule drivers have a deal,
the mules can use the trails and even have right of way on them,
but they're supposed to maintain the trails
which they clearly haven't been doing
on the second, third, and fourth miles going down South Kaibab.
Fortunately for our knees,
the last two miles, the steepest descent, was in excellent condition.
2006 May 8: Hiking Up Bright Angel from Phantom Ranch
2006 May 8: Hiking Up Bright Angel from Phantom Ranch
At 17 Km (10.5 miles),
the Bright Angel trail is longer than Kaibab
and the elevation change is slightly less,
only up to 6800 feet (2070 meters, 800 millibars).
While a 400-foot difference doesn't sound like much,
we would not have appreciated it if somebody
put an extra 400-foot climb at the top end of Bright Angel.
The climb isn't that much shallower
as the first 4 Km (2.5 miles) of the trail
follows the river with little elevation change.
I decided to take a side trip
from Indian Gardens to Plateau Point,
a 5.3 Km (3.3 mile) detour on a well-maintained, level path
so I could run it.
The advantage to me of running rather than hiking
is that the two activities use different-enough muscles
that one doesn't take away from my ability to do the other.
This assumes, of course, that I have enough
water.
To make the side trip timing perfect,
Indian Gardens is halfway up the Bright Angel trail,
so it made a perfect break for me
while Greg kept hiking up the trail and I would catch up.
Plateau Point is a viewpoint on the edge
of the dark-rock inner canyon,
not quite the heart-stopping drop off of
Toroweap,
but a wonderful vista-view
that doesn't require an airplane trip to a now-closed airport.
It does require a three-mile-round-trip from Indian Gardens,
well worth the extra effort.
The Bright Angel trail is more sheltered with more shade
than the South Kaibab trail.
The views are more intimate, less expansive,
but still wonderful, well worth the journey.
It's a Tough Job
It's a Tough Job
My little company, Khimetrics,
was recently acquired by a big company, SAP.
Now we have to face the job of connecting our
Khimetrics retail optimization software
to SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Five people came from the SAP offices in Germany
(and one from Chicago who did not go the the Grand Canyon)
for three days of meetings,
Tuesday through Thursday,
to work with us on this problem.
Our visitors decided they wanted to spend Friday
seeing the Grand Canyon.
Two of our guests decided they were going to hike
to the bottom (Phantom Ranch) and back.
It was freezing (-1°C., 30°F.) at the top at dawn
and getting warm (39°C, 102°F.) at the bottom during the day.
I gave our two intrepid hikers the usual "scare lecture"
pointing out that going down is easy,
coming up is hard,
quite a few people don't make it back without help,
and some don't make it back at all.
I tried to talk them into going down
only as far as Indian Gardens
and making a same-elevation side trip to Plateau Point
instead of going down even further.
Flying Over the Grand Canyon
Flying Over the Grand Canyon
Flying over the Grand Canyon is almost a religious experience,
more so in combination with hiking it and seeing it from the rim.
Two hikers having left in the rental car for Bright Angel Lodge,
I picked up my three airplane passenegers at Flagstaff Airport
(FLG)
at 6:00 a.m. while it was still cool.
Alas, it wasn't as cool as I had hoped,
14°C (57°F) instead of forecast 4°C (39°F).
My airplane is not a monster climbing machine,
so bringing four passengers to Canyon-viewing altitude on a warm day
takes a while.
I had us leave from Flagstaff instead of Grand Canyon
(GCN)
so we would have the extra travel time to climb.
The downside of the extra mileage
is my passengers spending an hour in a small airplane
over not-very-interesting, flat-desert terrain.
They remained enthusiastic and their anticipation grew
as the Canyon appeared and grew on the horizon.
The air was smooth, sun with no clouds,
and cool enough so we weren't sweating as we flew.
As we flew over the Grand Canyon
we took lots of pictures outside and inside the airplane.
Tourist Hike Down Bright Angel
Tourist Hike Down Bright Angel
While the view from the South Kaibab trail is
bigger, broader, and more breathtaking than Bright Angel,
and the South Kaibab trail is less crowded as well,
the car was already at Bright Angel Lodge
so it involved more travel with at least two more bus trips
and the South Kaibab trail is in bad condition.
I decided I would take my guests down to the first water stop
2.5 Km (1.5 miles),
a descent of 350 meters (1150 feet) as I recall.
The views are wonderful,
the rock formations are interesting,
the climb back is significant,
so my guests would be satisfyingly challenged
and ready for a good lunch.
With my guests well hydrated
and properly coated with sunscreen lotion,
and with cooperative weather,
we all enjoyed the effort and the scenery.
Hermits Rest Bus Tour
Hermits Rest Bus Tour
The final phase of my Canyon day tour
was a shuttle-bus tour of the various south-rim viewpoints.
Gawking at viewoints only gives a perspective of the Canyon
when one has other experiences that give a sense of scale.
The flight gave my guests a sense of dimension
and the hike gave them a moving panorama.
The buses come every twelve minutes and makes scheduled stops,
so viewers get multiples of twelve minutes at the viewpoints,
plus 90 minutes on the buses.
We picked five stops figuring about three hours for the total trip.
There's a kind of tourist urgency about having just twelve minutes,
but when a view kept us occupied,
we just stayed for 24 minutes instead.
How Did the Bold Adventurers Do?
How Did the Bold Adventurers Do?
As there was room for only three passengers in my airplane,
two of our five German guests decided to do some serious hiking.
They drove to Bright Angel Lodge,
left the rental-car keys with the front desk,
and hiked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
to Phantom Ranch.
My warnings may not have deterred my adventurous co-workers,
but it coaxed them into bringing a lot of water and drinking it.
They made it all the way to Phantom Ranch and back up,
not in time to bid me farewell as I flew home,
but in time to join their three colleages for dinner.
6:04:14 Mountain Standard Time
(MST).
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