I hiked into Arizona’s Grand Canyon—here is what it was like

One-armed, lavishly bearded and as powerful as bedrock, John Wesley Powell was the chief of the primary river passage by means of the Grand Canyon. The geologist and explorer wrote extensively about his expedition in 1869, concluding: ‘You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted. To see it, you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths.’

It’s on this spirit — if not fairly this timeframe — that I arrive in Arizona’s foremost nationwide park. I’m climbing the Escalante Route: a four-day circuit that snakes all the best way all the way down to the banks of the mighty Colorado River from the South Rim, the entry level to the canyon for the overwhelming majority of tourists. Ten miles of river frontage are traced earlier than the route joins up with the fabled Grandview Trail for the ascent again as much as rim stage. It’s a 35-mile backcountry magnificence, tackled by a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands who converge on the Grand Canyon every year, and I can’t wait to get began.

First, nonetheless, I’ve a small downside. “Awkward question,” I say, smiling on the park official sheepishly. “But where exactly is the canyon?” She appears to be like at me sympathetically. Clearly I’m not the primary customer to misplace one of many largest landforms on Earth. The subject is one in every of sight traces. The Colorado Plateau — elevated by tectonic forces lengthy earlier than the Colorado River and its attendant tributaries reached for his or her chisels — is unerringly flat and coated with pine and juniper forest. Which means a chasm measuring almost 280 miles lengthy, 10 miles throughout and a mile deep will be hid with little extra foliage than you’d must masks an unpleasant shed.

The pay-off, after all, is the massive reveal. The canyon may be very a lot a piece in progress, with the residual rock sculpted right into a maze as sprawling and complicated as a metropolis. Pinnacles and spires soar skywards. Muscular, sheer-walled escarpments fall away to gorges shrouded in shadow. Isolated buttes fan out at their base like extravagant ball robes.

‘Unfathomable’ is an overused adjective as of late, however, to the Spanish conquistadors who arrived on the South Rim in 1540 — the primary Europeans to see the Grand Canyon — it was apt. Humiliatingly so. Guided by members of the Native American Hopi tribe, García López de Cárdenas and his males had been taken to the chasm edge, the place they tried to course of what they had been surveying.

The river they might simply make out on the canyon ground was round 6ft throughout, they estimated. The boulders lining its path? Likely no greater than a person. “Nip down and take a look would you?” was the gist of the order Cárdenas gave to his males. And for 3 fruitless days they tried, scrambling across the canyon’s partitions and barely penetrating its craggy immensity. Eventually they returned, exhausted. The river, they reported, was in actual fact wider than Iberia’s Tagus, and people man-sized boulders ‘higher than the great tower of Seville’. The Grand Canyon would stay unbreached by Europeans for an additional two centuries.

It’s near the spot at which Cárdenas and his males made their misguided estimations that my hike begins. Here, some 25 miles east of the busy viewpoints accessed from the rim-edge Grand Canyon Village, and greater than 100 miles from the glass-bottomed Skywalk bridge, it’s eerily quiet. Far under, I can see the dusty blue-sliver of the Colorado method from the north and swing theatrically west.

Leading our little expedition is Braxton Adams, a Utah-based adventurer who exudes the 2 belongings you need most in a information: competence and persona. The dapper moustache is merely a bonus. The third member of our group is John, a 62-year-old out of doors fanatic from town of Flagstaff, a 90-minute drive south. We do our final checks of tenting gear and provisions and pull on our packs. “All set?” asks Braxton, smiling brightly. We nod, faucet trekking poles and step over the brink.

Time journey

Incongruously, it was the wild-eyed prospectors of the late nineteenth century who paved the best way for mainstream exploration of the Grand Canyon. Drawn by tales of bountiful gold, silver and copper, they set concerning the tortuously sluggish, constantly hazardous strategy of carving, laying and sometimes blasting trails out of the higher canyon partitions to hoped-for mining claims.

Modest quantities of treasured metals would certainly be discovered, however by no means in ample portions to offset the burden of extracting and hauling them out. An simpler earnings could possibly be garnered from servicing the rising urge for food amongst well-heeled guests to enterprise into the interior canyon for leisure.

It’s one in every of these former mining trails, the Tanner, that serves because the opening stretch of the Escalante Route. It’s 9 miles to our first deliberate tenting spot on the sandy south shore of the river, with a drop of round 4,500ft. In summer time, this largely uncovered path is infamous for its incinerating temperatures, however within the smooth sunshine of early spring, the situations are good: 14C or 15C, a lightweight breeze and cloudless skies.

We admire the cascading vines of the roundleaf buffaloberry, considered named for the sauce that early settlers constituted of the shrub’s berries to accompany buffalo meat. Equally hanging is the squat white sage. “Here, smell the leaves,” says Braxton, rubbing them between his fingers and providing up his hand. A smoky, pleasantly natural aroma fills my nostrils. He smiles. “Back in the day, men used to rub this on their necks after a long day on the trail. They called it ‘cowboy cologne’.”

The path is rocky and unmaintained however in first rate nick. As we descend, the thrilling nuance of the panorama begins to emerge. At instances it takes on the uniform of a Montana prairie, with golden grasses swaying within the breeze; at others, the sparse, desiccated shroud of an historical, deserted quarry.

Off to our proper is the grandly named Palisades of the Desert — the imposing japanese escarpment of the canyon. Long earlier than this panorama was pressured upwards by tectonic exercise and downcut by the Colorado, your complete area lay on the backside of nutrient-rich tropical seas.

The product of tens of hundreds of thousands of years of sequential deposition is vividly displayed on the canyon partitions, with every horizontal band as discrete and uniform as a toddler’s layered sand jar. Every step down spans 1,000,000 years, give or take. Reach the underside, place your hand on the immovable schist that arrested the river’s erosive progress and also you’ll be touching rock almost half as previous as Earth itself. ‘Perhaps it is not the size nor the huge witchery of changing shapes and shades that fills us with awe,’ wrote English novelist JB Priestley, upon visiting the canyon within the Nineteen Thirties, ‘but the obscure feeling that here we have an instantaneous vision of innumerable eons.’

We attain our focused riverside spot within the late afternoon, strip all the way down to our undershorts and plunge in — taking care to stay near the financial institution. What had appeared a placid waterway for a lot of our method reveals itself, at eye stage, to be an intimidating torrent.

Nearly 250,000sq miles of the American Southwest are drained by the Colorado. Standing on its banks, it’s not exhausting to think about the river — swollen by glacier soften and utilizing boulders and rocks as crude devices of abrasion — slicing its manner down by means of the layers of soppy sedimentary rock like a buzzsaw.

We scout round for a spot the place we will erect our tents and decide on a raised clearing simply again from the water. We every select a nook, finesse our respective shelters into life then collect round our foldaway stoves to prepare dinner dinner: a wilderness-sweetened feast of boil-in-the-bag rooster pad thai, strips of dried mango, and mussels in lemon-herb sauce on crackers. Braxton, who’s sourced a lot of the provisions — rigorously balancing energy with palatability — is the toast of the camp. We filter river water to high up our flasks, stow our gear and, to the soporific thunder of the surging Colorado, go to sleep beneath an unlimited dome of stars.

Hunter-gatherers

On multi-day hikes, rhythms are rapidly established and days tend to segue into each other. Not right here. Every half-hour or so, a markedly completely different view, panorama or problem is introduced. Sometimes it’s weaving by means of riverside thickets of head-high tamarisk shrubs, accompanied by the metallic chirp of the charismatic canyon wren. Then, maybe, a scramble up an iridescent rock ledge, or the cautious descent of a scree-filled runnel. I develop keen on the golden-orange halos of the pathside prickly pear cactuses as the daylight catches their tiny, barbed spines; and the hanging yellow tentacled flowers of the brittlebushes, which cluster like paparazzi round gullies, eagerly awaiting the fleeting look of rain.

Such is the peripheral jumble of gullies, ridges and canyons inside canyons, riverside progress is sluggish. On the afternoon of the second day, we enterprise greater than a mile ‘inland’, drop down into the pinnacle of a slot canyon many instances as excessive as it’s vast and crunch alongside its pebble-strewn sandy ground all the best way again spherical to the mouth. Our mixture riverine progress for this hour of thrilling exertion is only a few hundred yards.

A rain bathe the following morning sends us scuttling in direction of the closest rockface, the place we uncover a neat overhang. Loose stones have been stacked in a bow-shaped wall, forming a crude habitation. Laid out meticulously on a flat slab beneath the fire-blackened base of the overhang are sharpened fragments of flint-like purple and black rock — maybe the chert or obsidian with which the Native American hunter-gatherers who roamed these elements for almost 12 millennia furnished their projectiles. I’m shocked to see such useful archaeological objects unclaimed. “It’s just good practice,” says Braxton, with a shrug. “Anything that you find in the canyon must remain here.”

The river accompanies us like an outrider for a lot of day three. It’s a continuing presence, even when out of sight. Since Powell’s rowboat expedition, river rafting (or ‘running’, because it’s recognized right here) has grow to be massively widespread, with these tackling the total size of the Grand Canyon dealing with no fewer than 160 rapids. Arguably probably the most difficult of those is Hance Rapid, which drops 30ft over a tumultuous quarter of a mile or so. It’s in a sand-fringed pure pool simply upstream from this that we take our ultimate swim of the trek, because the solar flirts with the horizon. From this spot, simply 9 or so miles of the Escalante Route stay. But it’s all, to various levels, upwards — threaded by means of a panorama as dramatic as any thus far encountered.

When Victorian biologist Clinton Hart Merriam carried out research of the canyon within the late Eighties, he concluded that climbing from the river to the rim was climatically akin to journeying from the Mexican deserts to the Canadian Rockies. Yet, between these two extremes, as we start our climb within the embers of the penultimate day, I uncover echoes of locations I’ve recognized: from the towering, cloud-snagged peaks of the central Alps to the tawny, scree-streaked slopes of the Highlands.

We ascend for round an hour, then arrange our ultimate camp on a little bit plateau alongside the ancillary canyon of Hance Creek. Until now, provisions have been rigorously eked out. With the tip in sight, culinary frugality is disbursed with and we gorge on coconut curry, butternut dhal bhat, strips of beef jerky — something that also stays within the recesses of our packs.

As we’re nursing our post-prandial coffees, Braxton factors out the distinctive peak of Vishnu Temple, glowing defiantly above the encircling shadows. At 7,533ft, it’s one of many largest freestanding summits of the canyon, rising from the jumble of buttes and mesas throughout the chasm — a neat, tiered pyramid that does certainly resemble one thing sacred, one thing man-made. “This place just never stops surprising you,” says John, shaking his head in awe. A silent concurrence hangs over the camp. At size, we retreat to our tents and are asleep earlier than our heads hit the blow-up pillows.

White out

We wake refreshed, pack up camp with a practised effectivity and tick off the primary couple of miles earlier than breakfast with gusto, in temperatures which have us shedding layers. But by the point we attain the Hance Creek tenting space, round 5 miles from the rim, there’s a whisper of drizzle within the air and it’s perceptibly cooler. Such tenting areas — spartan, permit-only and dramatically located — are a characteristic of the half dozen or so trails staggered alongside the South Rim, every providing manageable tasters of the backcountry Grand Canyon expertise.

A keep at Hance Creek, with its dried riverbed setting shaded by vivid-green cottonwood bushes, is very prized. A whiff of espresso on the breeze and a few carefree chatter herald the presence of a small group. We greet them from afar with waves; it feels odd to be sharing the panorama with others once more, even one as expansive as this.

What follows are a few of the steepest and most traditionally resonant miles of the circuit. Near the intersection of the New Hance Trail and the Grandview, we go remnants of the Last Chance copper mine which, maybe cautious of the title, thrived for a decade on the flip of the final century. Alongside an deserted mine shaft is a rusted contraption for crushing ore, the stays of some rudimentary transport carts and gushing torrents of free rock spilling down the slope. It’s an uncovered, wind-whipped spot — eerily silent, richly atmospheric. I discover myself picturing the wretched souls who laboured right here day after day, little doubt cursing the merciless collusion of unyielding rock and unrelenting gradient.

The snow, when it begins, is wispy and unconvincing, like one thing from the set of a finances romcom. But as we proceed to climb, the flakes develop thicker and extra plentiful, blanketing the rocks and precariously perched junipers of the higher canyon slopes with stunning ease. We dig out gloves and hats and press on up the hairpin bends of the Grandview Trail, feeling oddly privileged to expertise such canyon extremes.

Up forward, a lone determine seems, strolling down the trail in direction of us. She wears waterproofs and a National Park Service cap. Beneath its darkish, snow-dusted brim is the broad smile of somebody in her component. This is Danielle Urich, a hydrologist on her manner into the canyon on one in every of her common multi-day journeys. Her position is to watch and measure water flows and hydrological exercise, she explains, and he or she usually ventures deep into the maze of caves and fractures that join the rim-level sinkholes with the canyon-floor springs.

Some of the issues she’s seen have left her speechless, she confesses. “There are some caves a hundred feet tall with a river running through them. It’s so beautiful.” The Flagstaff-based 27-year-old has labored within the canyon for almost three years and loves the stillness and seclusion. “Once you get away from the rim and the major trails, it’s so easy to find solitude,” she enthuses. After bidding us farewell, she is rapidly swallowed up by the enveloping whiteness.

We’ve parked a provisions-laden automobile within the small automotive park on the Grandview trailhead. The considered it sustains us by means of the ultimate mile, throughout which the shin-deep accumulation of snow on the steepening path slows our tempo to a laboured shuffle. Merriman’s assertion that an ascent of the Canyon is like journeying from the desert to the peaks of the Rockies is proving remarkably apt. Yet, in a welcome inversion, our approaching summit is one which will probably be sweetened with civilisation: a timber-hewn lodge within the close by gateway city of Tusayan; a warming tub and mattress. And, earlier than any of that, a pizza and beer feast wherein we are going to commerce favorite moments from our time spent ‘toiling through the labyrinths’ of this extraordinary place. John Wesley Powell, I wish to assume, would have permitted.