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Over a quarter of a century had passed since the first time. Now, twice as old as I was then, I prepared to head down the South Kaibab Trail into the heart of the Grand Canyon.
Unlike that first solo trek when temperatures in late September soared from the forties on the rim to 100-plus degrees at the bottom, my wife and I faced trails covered in ice and snow. Our crampons dug into the frozen dirt as we edged along the slickest spots. The twin hiking poles we each had rented provided extra physical stability and mental assurance against a nasty tumble.
On my earlier jaunt, I had gone bare-bones. A worn blanket, some homemade gorp, an old Kodak Instamatic camera, battered binoculars, and a couple cans of tuna and an opener rested in my backpack. A newly purchased gallon canteen bounced against my hip. Wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans, and square-toed cowboy boots, I had clambered down the seven or so miles to the Bright Angel campground in four hours, spent the night sleeping on a bench in an open-sided stone shelter, and climbed out the next day in four hours and forty minutes.
In contrast, last Christmas, my wife and I each carried large packs filled with supplies, clothing, and food. I even carried tennis shoes for traipsing about the next day while we stayed in the cabins at Phantom Ranch. No sleeping outdoors for us. Though the temps were predicted to be close to sixty when we arrived, we would be sleeping in beds in our respective men's and women's heated bunkhouses. Not only had we signed up for beef stew dinners and all-you-can-eat breakfasts, we also purchased the "sack" lunches for each of the next two days.
As we lost altitude and the ice vanished, we made the acquaintance of a nonchalant mountain sheep heading up the Kaibab as well as a number of human travelers joining us in our quest for the Colorado River. My time-softened memories struggled to match the overwhelming vistas and the formidable vagaries of the trail with what I had experienced literally half a lifetime ago.
Through snow flurries to warm sunshine, we ventured across the sloping plateaus and grinding switchbacks that guided our path. Over two-hundred digital photos, a pause to bandage sore toes, and more frequent rest stops to accommodate my aging body added fifty-percent to my original pace. Six hours after we started, we crossed the Kaibab Bridge over the Colorado and headed wearily to the Phantom Ranch and a well-deserved rest.
The next day we made an easy trek up the North Kaibab Trail to Phantom Canyon near which we observed five California condors soaring in the deep blue sky. An attempt to discover the stone structure at Bright Angel campground where I had slept twenty-six years earlier proved fruitless. Whether this was a result of decaying memory or destruction of the shelter, I could not determine.
On the third morning, we rose early. After a quick breakfast in the canteen, we shouldered our packs and headed out. We faced close to a ten mile slog to regain the almost five-thousand feet in altitude we had lost the first day on the Kaibab Trail.
As we followed the River Trail to the Bright Angel Trail proper, we felt rested and prepared. While Bright Angel is a longer trail than Kaibab, it is generally considered an easier route to take to the rim. A climb up the strenuous Devil's Corkscrew brought us to Indian Gardens. After a rest and refueling stop, we tackled Jacob's Ladder and the toughest part of the climb: three-thousand feet of unforgiving switchbacks, with icy trails, freezing temperatures, and increasingly biting winds as we neared the trailhead.
Based on my Seventies' experience, I initially thought we might reach our destination in a time close to our descent. But as six grueling hours passed, then seven, I knew that was not to be. As we neared the eighth hour of our merciless climb, we -- finally! -- found ourselves among the crowds exploring the rim.
While millions of tourists visit Grand Canyon National Park (about 4.7 million last year, up nearly 56% since my visit in 1978), less than ten percent of those casual visitors leave the ease of the blacktopped Rim Trail and dare enter the canyon itself. An even smaller percentage of people who sink into the canyon proceed all the way into the Inner Gorge and the Colorado River a mile below them.
While a vacation into the Grand Canyon might, at first blush, appear to have little relevance to the economic and political issues bedeviling us, the more I witnessed in those few days, the more I came to see attitudes and actions that reflect a great chasm of another kind dividing the citizens of our nation. A metaphor, yes, but one with real-world implications we would do well to heed.
On the South Kaibab Trail, we passed a wide variety of folks trudging towards the top. There was the single, overweight woman who looked as though she rarely exercised but continued her journey despite the agonizing distance she had yet to travel. In the early afternoon, we passed a mother with a screaming infant carried on her back, the stress and weariness and effort clearly etched on the woman's face...with another four or five hours of rugged trail confronting her. An older woman -- her mother, perhaps -- sought to comfort the baby. A pair of men farther down on the trail might have been the pair's husbands. Or maybe not.
All day we played leapfrog with a family -- mother, father, and two grade school aged daughters -- who had granted one of the girls her birthday wish to spend time in the canyon. We learned later that the father had no place to sleep for the second night. If they could not snag a vacancy, he would have to climb out alone the next day and then descend yet again on the third morning to meet his family somewhere on the Bright Angel Trail...and then climb out the rest of the way with them.
We also met folks who obviously considered the steepness of the Kaibab Trail no major concern as they climbed uphill. A young park ranger passed us with few signs of fatigue as he paused to ask if we needed help as we perused our map. During a meal later at the Phantom Ranch canteen, we visited with a man who had retired from the railroad and taken a job with the Park Service for a chance to visit different areas of the country. He worked at the El Tovar Hotel where we would be spending the night upon our return. After hiking to the top in four hours with a fellow employee barely half his age, this gentlemen reported to work the same afternoon and greeted us with a high-five when we struggled into the hotel lobby.
When we climbed up the Bright Angel Trail, we passed a pair of young women, one of whom hobbled along on an evidently injured foot, her friend providing a hand as best she could. As we rested on the toughest part of the climb, a father and his son of about five-years age passed us. I jokingly asked, "Why do we do this to ourselves?" He answered, "You just have to do it. One foot after the other. There's no other choice."
And he was right, of course.
The Park Service places a warning on the bottom of the backcountry use permits it issues: "Note: Hikers are responsible for their own safety. Know your limits!" Throughout the park, signs remind even day-hikers of this idea. Countless Websites reinforce the fact that park officials are under no obligation to rescue people who get into trouble. Whether someone fails to bring sufficient food and water and suffers heat exhaustion; whether a visitor twists an ankle or has legs wobbling from fatigue (as mine were at the end of the first day...); whether one misjudges the time constraints and has to walk in the dark; whatever the problem, whatever the concern, each and every hiker is responsible for himself.
Other hikers frequently will help to the extent that they can. But they need their own limited supplies of water, bandages, and food for their own use. They can share only so much. Most have enough difficulty getting themselves out of the canyon and cannot directly assist a stranger to climb to safety.
If the Park Service does come to a person's aid, the rescuee is the one who must bear the burden of the cost. From hundreds of dollars for a rescue by mule to thousands or tens-of-thousands for a rescue by helicopter (if possible, at all), the person requesting the help is the one billed.
As we toiled up the Bright Angel Trail, we encountered quite a few people who apparently had little idea what they were getting themselves into. Tourists in street shoes. Tourists with no food and no water. Tourists wearing only a light jacket or less. Tourists sans crampons. Tourists reaching Indian Gardens well after noon...
All we could do was shake our heads. It was relatively easy going down this most-used trail with gravity assisting them. I strongly suspected that the casual hikers would keenly regret their impulsive actions after three or four or five hours of fighting the constant pull of that now-traitorous gravity as they returned to their starting point.
They would, of course, have no one to blame but themselves...and no one to extricate them from their woeful circumstances...except themselves.
Millions of people in this country need -- and deserve -- the kind of rude awakening these hapless hikers eventually received.
Business owners who claim it is too difficult to survive in their chosen professions without subsidies; single parents who declare they cannot make ends meet if they and their children do not receive welfare for food, shelter, and medicine; students who complain they cannot afford to attend school without government grants and loans; retired folks who wail that they will suffer too greatly without Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security; citizens who insist the government protect them by disarming their neighbors. The list of those who look first to the State to solve their problems large-and-small is endless.
But people who are inefficient in what they do; who make bad choices in love; who live for the moment and ignore the future; who simply are not as talented as they think they are; no matter what the reason for their plight, individuals in precarious circumstances have no moral claim on the lives or money or time of strangers. Even those who lose jobs or become ill or find themselves laid low through no fault of their own cannot demand assistance from those who have not chosen to offer it. They can only ask.
The true measure of a person is not revealed in situations where help is a phone call away or when he knows that others will extricate him -- at other people's expense -- from the messes he creates for himself. It is when a person finds herself weary and discouraged and downhearted and gets to the bottom of her soul to see who and what she truly is; when she discovers whether or not she has the resolve, the determination, the courage -- the will -- to lift that aching, exhausted leg to reach that one next high step...and the next one and the one after that; when she realizes that in the final analysis we are all responsible for ourselves, for our decisions...for our own lives.
Americans as a whole should emulate the hikers in the Grand Canyon who have to rely upon themselves, their friends and family, and upon the voluntary assistance of passers-by to reach their goals. Not only is that the ethical course to follow, those who brave the canyon and succeed on its own terms experience a sense of accomplishment at overcoming the adverse conditions they encounter. The boost in self-confidence -- and, yes, pride -- they earn is something they could never achieve by other means.
The Grand Canyon is a breathtaking environment, sometimes deceptive in its beauty, alternately inviting and harsh, changing day-by-day, dangerous for those unprepared for or unwary of its hazards, yet offering a uniquely rewarding challenge to those willing to accept the conditions they find and deal with them as they should. It is society and reality in a microcosm.
Getting to the bottom -- whether of the Grand Canyon or one's heart and spirit -- can be an arduous and scary process. It is also the essence of what it means to be a human being.
