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Friday, January 18, 2013
While I remembered to set the alarm to a new time, I forgot to switch the switch to make it go off... However, I woke up about ten minutes before it would have gone off and realized just minutes later that it hadn't gone off. So, no harm done.
We had a small group at our breakfast table this morning. The other table had all the Mennonites. This was the early breakfast (5:30) and we were all hiking out today. It was a pleasant group at our table. We sat talking too long, however, and got a little later start than expected.
We took the duffel to the drop off area and discovered it was 1.5 pounds overweight. So, we pulled out the cribbage board (again) and nine Clif bars. That returned the weight to just under 30 pounds, which was our limit. We resettled the removed items into the backpacks and took off.
We walked out of camp about 7:10. Dawn wasn't until 7:39, so it was a little dark. Carl started out with his headlamp on, but I didn't. I thought there was enough light to see the rocks.
Earlier in the week, one blowhard insisted that there was a microwave relay on the Rim for communications with the bottom. In fact, he pointed to a lit area near the Rim as being the sun reflecting off of it. Well, that was half an hour before dawn on the Rim... Today, I saw the light spot more clearly. It was the lights of El Tovar, one of the hotels on the Rim... they had probably turned on some lights to start serving breakfast and that's what we were seeing.
I still felt tired from the whole week and wondered if I'd make it to the top. In fact, I nearly fell into one of the streams we were crossing. My pole got stuck between two rocks and, in trying to free it, I went off balance. No harm, however, just a wet boot.
The photo on the left is a view of part of our trail and what we saw looking back towards the Colorado River. The photo on the right is the same large frozen waterfall we had skirted on the way down. The trail was still pretty treacherous today.
We have half a dozen stream crossings on Bright Angel Trail and we've never seen the streams so full! Normally, crossing is easy with several stepping stones sticking up well above the water line. Not so this time.
The photo on the left shows a small waterfall that has formed where Pipe Creek exits the Tapeats Narrows section of the Bright Angel Trail. The photo on the right shows a dead agave clinging to the side of the cliff just below trail level. This is in the Tapeats Narrows, one of the last segments of the Bright Angel Trail to be built. It's carved from the rock face for most of the length of this narrow canyon.
A mule train of riders came by as we approached Indian Gardens. I stepped about 4 feet off the trail and asked the leader if this was the inside or outside of the trail. She laughed and said I was fine, then thanked me for stepping off the trail. She didn't know that I didn't want to get run over... again.
At our last rest stop before Indian Gardens, I turned around and snapped the photo on the left, showing our view back down towards the River.
We got to Indian Gardens about 11:45, which wasn't bad. However, we never did shed as many layers as I thought we might. After half an hour there, we were on the trail again. And I put the camera away for the rest of the ascent. It's swinging was annoying me...
We were soon in the shade again and heading up again. We started running into snow on the trail just past the three mile rest house. That's where we took off the crampons on the way down. However, most of the trail was either covered by a thin layer of sand – thick enough for traction, but thin enough that we knew there was ice under it, or was snow packed. Traction seemed much better on the way up than the way down.
However, once we got to that frozen waterfall about half a mile from the top, we put the Yak Tracks on for traction and left them on the rest of the way up. Day trippers will frequently come down that far just to say they had been below the Rim. As a result, it was very icy all the rest of the way to the Rim.
We crested the top about 5:30, just minutes before sunset. Carl hiked back to the Backcountry parking lot to get the car while I checked into the hotel. As I entered the lodge, three young men held the door for me. One turned to the others and said “Didn't we pass her on the trail?” You and everyone else....
While in the lobby, I checked with the Phantom Ranch desk to find out the best way to retrieve our duffel, since we hadn't picked it up before 4 pm. We had two choices: pay a late fee and have a taxi drive us over to the mule barn where someone would unlock the building and let us in or pick it up between 6 and 9 am tomorrow. Well, except for deodorant and a comb, there wasn't anything in the duffel that we had to have that night, so we decided to wait and pick it up in the morning.
We dropped everything in the new cabin (just around the corner from the other cabin) and took our first showers since Tuesday. Very nice! Carl said I used up all the hot water and his shower was luke warm...
Once we had showered and redressed, we headed back to the Lodge for dinner. Carl had mahi-mahi tacos with a beer while I had the trout with a glass of wine. The soup and vegetables were over spiced and inedible. The rest was good, however.
After returning to our cabin, I texted Kelly to let her know we were back on the Rim and we went to bed. I think we turned out the lights at 9.