Six Days in a Tent

Ten days ago leaving Austin, TX, seems like an eternity ago now.  We spent 6 straight nights camping, in 6 different places, hiked the Grand Canyon and drove over 1500 miles for over 28 hours in the car.  Due to the fact that this is the first post in 10 days, this post will be ridiculously long, so we'll try to break it down some.  We'll split the time into a camping post, Las Vegas post, and a Goin' to California post.

Here goes:

Tuesday June 21

We woke up early, said goodbye to Billy and went to get some gas.  Thanks again to Billy for hosting us in weird Austin, TX.  After finally letting Billy move back into his bedroom, we headed off to New Mexico.  At the gas station we rolled down one of our windows and, to our surprise and excitement (not), it would not go back up!  We spent the next 2 hours at a car repair place getting the window switch replaced.  We didn't think we could spend over 12 hours driving in over 100 degree air with the window down.  Let's just pray that that's the least of our car trouble along the way! Finally we got on the road for the long drive to just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

Middle of Nowhere Texas

The only New Mexico  sign we saw!

Western Texas looks exactly like what you think of when you think of any old Western film.  Rolling hills of dry grass, with short scrub trees, cactus and ranches along the way.  We drove most of the way on smaller highways due to our unusual route so at times we were the only people on the road.  We could see nothing for miles in every direction.

After crossing into New Mexico, we headed north and found that our route took us through Roswell, NM.  Though we saw a few sketchy alien stores, no green men were spotted.

We camped for the night on the east side of the mountains next to Albuquerque at a small campground.  Due to it already being past 8:00, almost sunset and our tiredness from the day of driving we simply set up our tent, made some mac and cheese for dinner and went to sleep under the stars.

Wednesday June 22

Wednesday morning we packed up and headed West yet again.  On the way out of the campground, we saw a prairie dog compound.  It's pretty weird.  After heading out of the campground, we drove through Albuquerque, but can't say that we really saw it cause we only saw it from the highway.  We'll just have to come back some day and explore a little more.  All we know about it is that it's a sprawling city nestled in the valley next to mountains.  It's very hot, dry, and orange.

The Painted Desert

The Petrified Forest - Giant stone logs.  Only the tree's cell wall is left, the rest is stone filled in. 

About halfway to the Grand Canyon, we made a detour through the Petrified Forest National Park.  The Painted Desert is also included in the park.  Such a cool drive through the park as the scenery changes from rolling hills of rock of different colors in the Painted Desert, to flat boring land, to random hills to rolling hills filled with Petrified Wood.  It was very, very hot still, but we had a good time driving through and seeing the weird desert landscape.

Mather Campground- Complete with Giant Raven

Sunset from the Rim - We'd be hiking down the canyon on the upper left.

We then continued our drive all the way to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  What a sight!  We raced through the park (at 35 miles/hour for an hour on curvy streets on the edge of the canyon) and arrived at the Backcountry Office 15 minutes after it closed.  We needed to talk with the rangers because we have a different car than was listed on our permit, and we wanted to make sure they knew which car to look at if we didn't come back up on schedule.  We were able to find one ranger who was outside the office and was able to help us.  After updating our license plate, we spent the evening setting up camp in the Mather Campground, which is only about 5 minutes from the South Rim.  While setting up camp, we sorted through all our stuff to pack up our backpacks with all the essentials we would need on our trip to the bottom of the canyon. We brought too much, but at least we were prepared.  Mather Campground was a cool (relative to Austin and the rest of Texas) 85 degrees and pretty quiet.  If we go back,  we would definitely  try to stay there again.





Thursday June 23rd

We woke up to the alarm in our tent at 4:00am packed everything up and drove to the the back-country office where we would leave our car during our backpacking trip. After a scramble to make sure we had everything we would need, we hopped on the shuttle, with only seconds to spare, and were on our way to the trail head.

At the Rim ready to hike down.  (Still clean and not sore yet)

After arriving at the rim, we took a couple of pics of our clean, smiling faces prior to entering the canyon, and turned and hiked into the Grand Canyon.  It was still surprising to us that we were actually hiking the Grand Canyon at this point.  You couldn't see the bottom from where we started, and we could see pretty darn far from there.

Our hike took us down the South Kaibab Trail to the Bright Angel Campground along the Colorado River at the Bottom.  The South Kaibab Trail is 7 miles of steep terrain along a ridge in the canyon.  We started hiking at 5:15am at around 70 degrees and finally got down to the campground at 10:30am at about 120 degrees.  It was incredibly hot.  We're very thankful for our days in Austin, TX in the heat to acclimatize ourselves to the extreme heat a little bit.

Switchbacks! Yeah!!!

The 120 degrees at the bottom was relentless.  The only relief was the Bright Angel Creek that runs through the campground and the shade from the cottonwood trees. We're not sure how cold the water was, but the mountain water was cool enough! Most of the hikers spent most of the day sitting in little pools along the creek trying to keep cool, resting tired legs and just enjoying the scenery.  The Colorado River runs too fast, too deep and too dangerous there at the bottom to swim in so the creek sufficed just fine.  The sun "sets" or really just goes over the adjacent ridge at 4:00pm so we didn't have any relief from the heat or the sun until then. Thus, we spent the whole day sweating, trying to drink more Gatorade and water to replenish ourselves and eating trail mix while lounging in the rippling Bright Angel creek.

When the sun finally set, we made dinner and crawled into bed.  That night was pretty miserable as it didn't get down below 100 degrees until well past midnight.  We tried our best to sleep in the intense heat, and our exhaustion made it pretty easy to sleep, even in 100+ degrees. Normally a five hour hike would leave you a little sore, but the heat in the Grand Canyon takes it all out of you.   Our legs, especially our calves from the steep hike downhill were (and still are) just ripped apart.

Friday June 24th

Our original plan was to wake up in Bright Angel and hike to the North Rim back up the North Kaibab Trail, which would have allowed us to purchase some of those cool Rim-to-Rim souvenirs . However, upon talking with the Ranger at Bright Angel, we learned that the North Kaibab Trail was 14 miles uphill and with our already sore legs, we didn't think we'd make it!  We also would have had to stay at the North Rim Lodge and pay a shuttle to take us the 4 1/2 hours back to the South Rim to our car.  Due to the extreme heat, many people cancelled their hikes to Bright Angel so the campground was only 2/3 full.  The ranger told us that we might have a chance to get a campsite in the Indian Garden Campground, half way up the Bright Angel Trail, if we got there early in the morning. With the Bright Angel Trail only 9.6 miles and the Indian Garden Campground only 4.7 miles away, we decided to change our plans.

Endless Switchbacks on our way up.

California Condors!

Following the creek up Bright Angel Trail

We got up at 4:00am Friday morning, packed up our stuff and started our hike up to Indian Garden.  This hike was beautiful with the first 2 miles following the Colorado River along a ridge and then following a creek up to Indian Garden.  Despite the heat and our very sore legs, we made it up to Indian Garden in time to talk to the Ranger there and secure ourselves a campsite for the night.  Even at Indian Garden the thermometer read 120 degrees in the sun!  The heat was unbearable unless you were in the shade.  Luckily, Indian Garden also had a small creek to soak and cool our tired legs.  We spent basically the whole day sitting in the creek cooling off and chatting with several of the other hikers.  In the evening we were visited by a mule deer in the campground and eventually made it to bed at the not-so-late hour of 8:00pm.

At our Campsite at Indian Garden

Relaxing by the creek pool at Indian Garden

Saturday June 25th

Due to Nate's watch still being on Illinois time (oops), we accidentally woke up at 2:00am instead of 4:00am on Saturday morning.  We laid there for a moment wondering why it was so dark (even the stars were still out!) and none of the other hikers were up yet.  Then we started to see some other flashlights.  Apparently some other people actually thought it might be a good idea to get started at 2:00am too!  We eventually got up, making breakfast and packed up in the dark.  At about 3:45am, we were ready to go despite the stars still in the sky.  Oh well, at least it was a little bit cooler outside.  We hiked in the dark for a while and were able to watch the sunrise into the canyon.  What a beautiful sight to behold!

At this point, we still had 4.9 miles to hike to get out of the canyon and we felt the pain with almost every step.  Nate says I looked like a total zombie walking up the hill and apparently one of the rangers that we past  who was heading down the canyon, stopped Nate to ask how I was doing cause I didn't look too well.  I had my knee wrapped in an Ace bandage due some knee strain pain I was experiencing, and supposedly the ranger was willing to get help for me.  Nate didn't tell me this until we were out of the canyon though!  So I had to push through the pain by myself all the way to the top.

At about 8:45am, after almost 5 hours of walking uphill with our heavy packs, we finally made it to the rim!!

We made it to the top!

The first thing we did was snap a few pictures to document the momentous occasion, then we caught a shuttle to our car (another 1/2 mile, even on level ground, was not in the cards at this point), sat down, took off our shoes and headed to the showers!  By this time we had not had a shower since Tuesday, so that makes it 5 days in some pretty extreme temperatures, sweating most of the time, without a shower.  Thus the shower felt soooo good!!!

After a shower!!

The next priority after the shower was of course, FOOD!!  After 3 days of backpacking food, including: trail mix, rice, pepperoni and crackers, and mac and cheese, the only thing we wanted was a big juicy cheeseburger!!  Oh and they tasted fantastic!

The rest of the day we set up camp at the Desert View campground at the rim, sat on our camp chairs in the shade and read some books.  Finally some relaxation after many days of hard hiking.  We also caught the sunset over the canyon one last time.

Sunday June 26th

We packed up camp once again, this time putting our gear into a car instead of our backpacks, took one last look at the canyon and hit the road. Again. Our destination was Zion National Park in southern Utah, which you'll find in the next post.