Mike, Marriage, and Motherhood

Easter 1989

On the first day we drove through the mountains and walked briefly through the limestone and reached our destination.

On the second day we walked all along the edge. The March sun reflected the magnificent view to our left. Its warmth eventually reached our bottled ice on the picnic table, which had been bottled water the night before. We started to learn the names. The appropriately named Abyss. The fancifully termed Temple of Isis, the throne of Wotan, the seat of Shiva. There is space enough for all the gods. Although a mere eight miles, and flat, the trail was tough enough to knot up citified muscles, and that night I collapsed gratefully into the not-warm-enough sleeping bag with very shaky legs. There was literally no room at the inns; the week before Easter is their highest season.

Again Gill and I scrambled out of our tiny tent, boiled tea on our tiny stove, and waited for the southern sun to loosen frozen joints. Then, early on the third day, we went down a little, through the yellow Kaibab limestone with its fossil snails and through the Toroweap limestone bearing rows of (?) brachiopods, and even through the Coconino layer which is 600 feet of sandstone till we found the bright red Supai. The sloping Supai esplanade lets you travel sideways between the chasms and the cliffs, and a winding trail led to the most delightful and perfect spring dripping out of the Coconino and flowing gently into a garden of cottonwood trees. Dripping Spring trail was the first great test. Would I get up again? 1350 feet vertically through the Coconino, the Torweap, the Kaibab, not as fast as some, but not terribly slow either. We celebrated with a steak dinner, not cooked on our too-dark campsite.

Emboldened by slight success, we headed twelve miles east on day 4 to the Grandview Trail and started down again along a path that had in places to be lashed to the side of the rocks, so steep was the cliff. Told to carry plenty of water, we had a gallon. At first Horseshoe Mesa was a semi-mythical destination, visible far below beneath the bright red Supai, coated grey-green by vegetation. But eventually we were there and still we kept going, down the vertical side of the Red Wall, which was grey when born but soon stained red by iron from the Supai above. And below the Red Wall was Miners Spring, where water drips out of the solid rock into a little cave basin. No Giardia survive in water filtered through 3000 feet of rock. There were girls from Oregon and Boy Scouts from New Jersey and empty mines to explore, with almost no copper ore at all. Shafts deep enough to kill—no question of that. This place is for the adventurous, and the timid masses should not be told about it. Four hours to climb out, up the red and the grey and the white; up the cliffs and talus slopes and gentle paths through the top limestones and back to our not-warm-at-all tent where the undrunk part of the water gallon was left outside to freeze overnight. But by now the muscles were complaining less.

Finally, on the fifth day, we took a real hike. Up with the sun to breakfast and shave, taken on a bus with the twenty-year old hearties, all laden with winter clothing and frame packs full of sleeping bags and, above all, freshly thawed water for the desert below, and the all-important permit and packets of moleskin for the blisters to come, delivered at the trailhead by 8 am. 

And so we started down for real, through the Kaibab and the Toroweap with magnificent open views across 18 miles, through 600 feet of the Coconino, past temples and buttes carved fantastically by ancient flash floods, through the sloping Supai that stains the red wall and the hiker and his boots, and yet ever down.

There were mules coming and going. Mules carrying dusty Texan cowboys up, and mules for carrying painted cowboy wives down, and mules standing around and waiting for the rangers to finish their day’s work, and the mules shared our trail, and it was wise to mind our step. Down  the Red Wall into the Tonto, hundreds of feet of that, and then down into untouched layers, way back in the Paleozoic. Shales full of worm casts and, with a slight imagination, fossil trilobites. Down the shales hundreds of feet to the Great Unconformity where the 500-million-year-old rocks touch pre-Cambrian rocks 1500 million years older still. No fossils here: they were wiped out long ago by the heat of mountain building. 12000 feet of mountain used to be above this spot, and no trace remains. 

And below the first layers of pre-Cambrian lie the ominous grey-black cliffs of nice gneiss and Vishnu schist, twisted and torn and hardened and invaded by veins of pink granite that somehow had found cracks and holes even at such depths in the bases of ancient ranges. The cliffs finally cut by the river which we can at last see, still thousand feet below. And so ever downwards into pregeology, and the welcoming but giardia-filled river which at the rim looked six feet wide but is actually 300 feet, as befits as Great American River. And there finally we stopped going down the Grand Canyon, for the river has only got this far, and the gneiss and the schist are hard and won’t wear easily. But the river is a mile below the rim and has cut this deep in a mere six million years, so one must not be critical.

There in the cleft of the inner canyon it was summer, and the flowers were blooming on the trees beside the river, and the hikers were resting and tending their blisters, and when they dared, they poked their feet into the river whose temperature was the only reminder of winter-spring on the rim. We found ruined Indian houses from 1200AD, and beaches for the rafts that came in this century, and, amazingly, wonderful bathrooms, and a campsite where we could sleep without a tent and watch those stars that the canyon walls framed, fearing only larcenous squirrels and a tame wild turkey whose job it was to vacuum up raisins and nuts spilled by the campers.

The climb out may need only a day, but we took two. Long before the desert had a chance to find its midday heat, we were plodding back up the Vishnu, up a different route called the Bright Angel Trail, up a stream bed that traces a 20 mile fault across the canyon, which gave us welcome shade for grand vistas, back up to an oasis where Indians used to grow corn and beans and tame turkeys and where they tried not to be found by other Indians, or Spaniards, or US cavalry. But now they are all gone, and the agriculture is practiced by the Park Service who grow cottonwood trees for shade and fruit trees for blossom, and grass that is so fragile no one must walk on it. This is on the Tonto level, a huge expanse 1500 feet from the bottom, a great platform along which you can walk for miles and miles if you don’t mind thorn bushes scragging your legs and the almost total absence of shade. We reached Indian Gardens for lunch, and thought briefly of continuing to the top, but that idea died in the heat of midday. For the first time in memory, Gill had no book and no tennis court, not even a pack of cards. Beyond the rim, the world was celebrating the crucifixion, but no one packed religion into Indian Gardens. We found some Australians who could play 500 but had no cards! and some Swiss who cook for Presidents, and we were not after all bored.

Then again to bed with the sun (7 pm) and up with the sun (6am) for the final assault. Packing takes little time when you are almost out of food, but we loaded the obligatory gallon of, ultimately, unnecessary, water, and strode up into the dawn to attack the final 3000 feet. Up through the layers of shale and limestone and sandstone, of petrified mud and shells and ancient deltas, up, up past the rivers of day-hikers coming, all of them smiling and fresh and pitying and perhaps a little troubled since they will have to go up before the day is out, and it is awfully hot in the middle of the day, and it gets dark so soon. And families with tiny tots who will have to be carried, and fat people who puff even going down, but not too many of them. But then these people start to be wearing sweaters and jackets and hoods, and there is ice on the trail, and a cold, wind, and finally when we get to the top, there is an icy blast, and while we were sleeping under the stars in the warmth, they had all shivered in the wind, and the incipient storm still keeps most of them in bed. And as we drink coffee in the lodge, how superior we feel to the lodge dwellers who have only just got up and won’t do much today anyway. Or any day. That night it snowed six inches on the canyon rim. We were snug in a motel in Flagstaff. 

In 1989, 4,500,000 will see the Grand Canyon. For the most part that verb is precise. The average stay is a mere thirty minutes, which must include bathroom time and a coca cola. In their droves, they drive along the rim, immortalize the scene in a single pan of video tape, and move on to Las Vegas for more thrills. Very often the wife never steps out of her RV. Perhaps one visitor in five ventures below the rim for any distance. So-called back country camping is limited to 100,000 permits a year. We had to wait three days for our permit.