And then climb back up!

To cut to the chase: Yes, I successfully made it down to the river. And, more importantly, I returned to the Rim. As the Park signs proclaim: "Down is Optional. Up is Mandatory."

Whether I was even going to get started on my hike was touch and go for a while, however. I woke up Saturday morning, looked out the window, and saw a pine forest white with snow. A winter wonderland! Oh no. Just what I needed. A Winter Wonderland! About three inches of snow had fallen during the night, and it continued snowing all day Saturday. Snowing, and gusting with high winds. Only a few brave souls struggled along the rim trail, trying to view some signs of the canyon through the opaque white-out.

It snowed some more Saturday night, but tapering off, and the weather forecast for Sunday looked promising. Therefore, I put on four layers of clothes, filled my daypack with water bottles and candy bars, and began my descent.

For the first half mile or so, the Bright Angel trail was slushy, but the temperatures were warm enough that it wasn't particularly slippery. From that point until about the 1.5 mile Resthouse, the trail just got wetter and muddier, with snow only along the sides. And after that, conditions just kept getting better and better, and layers of clothes just kept coming off.

By the time I reached the cottonwood tree oasis of Indian Gardens -- 3,000 feet below the rim -- I was down to my t-shirt and enjoying my rest break in warm sun. One nice thing about really crummy weather up on the Rim? Lots of solitude on the trails. Coming down to Indian Gardens, I probably saw more Park staff doing trail repair than I saw fellow hikers.

Below Indian Gardens, I was hiking in new (for me) territory. The Tonto plateau, and all the layers of rock above, are sedimentary and easily erodable -- by water, wind, and gravity. Below, the river cuts a narrow V-shaped channel through much denser and harder, pre-Cambrian, metamorphic schist -- rock that is much older than the sedimentary layers that lie atop it. The views are no longer expansive. The walls about you are dark-hued. They close in about you as you descend farther and farther. You never see the river until:

Wow, there it is right in front of you!

I spent about a half hour poking about the river shore. A number of rafters had pulled in for a rest stop a few yards up river, and a couple of their group were paddling around in kayaks, being careful not to get far from shore. The water was fairly calm in this area, but to my left, downstream, the river quickly fell into a stretch of rapids. The Colorado is an attractive river, at the point I encountered it, and narrower than I expected.

I really wanted to follow the river about two miles farther upstream to the Campground (which is where the 9.3-mile figure came from in my earlier post) and the Phantom Ranch (which would make an ideal overnight spot, if one only had the reservations, which need to be made far in advance). But I'd left the Rim a bit later than I'd hoped to, and I was afraid of not making it back before nightfall.

And so -- there was nothing to be done but turn around and begin climbing back. Up.

I won't bore you with the aches and pains of my 7.5 mile ascent. Let's just say that it's probably just as well that I hadn't irritated my body further by forcing it to handle that additional four-mile round trip to Phantom Ranch. As it was, I arrived back at the Rim at 5 p.m. And weary.

I wasn't embarrassed to take the shuttle back to my lodge, rather than walk another 1.5 miles.

We make jokes about the ineptness of government. But three cheers for the National Park Service. They have done an excellent job of managing a park that caters to both the casual tourists who dread getting out of their cars and walking a quarter mile to see the Canyon, and the hardy mountain men who descend into the canyon and don't emerge for a week or so. I'm impressed especially by the signage along the rim trail, easily viewed by all Park visitors, that gives a really decent and understandable explanation of the geological history of the Grand Canyon and -- as a result -- a sense of the awesome lengths of time that nature took to create the spectacle now on view.

In terms of time, human existence certainly is only a tiny exclamation point at the end of a very long novel. Looking about me, I felt the extraordinary fortune that allowed me to exist as part of that tiny morsel of punctuation.
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Photos, from top (click to enlarge):

1. Rafts putting in where trail first hits the Colorado
2. Snow on Saturday the day before the hike
3. Bright Angel Trail, leaving Indian Gardens before descent into Inner Canyon
4. Tourists relaxing up at the Village on the rim

For 20 more photos of the hike, click here.