Well...we didn't really pay attention to that at first...

“Start your hike well before sunrise. Plan on reaching your destination by 9am. Rest in the shade between 9 AM – 4PM. Plan your hike to accommodate this siesta”.

Blew that off too, at first.

“Your body expends tremendous energy while hiking and trying to stay cool. Doubling your calorie intake helps to maintain your energy. Eat double the amount you normally would.”

Eating has never been a problem, personally.

“[The Clear Creek Trail] is the only trail traversing the Tonto Platform on the north side of the Colorado River. Because the slope is south-facing, the hike from Bright Angel Campground to Clear Creek is warmer than most trails in the fall and spring, and is nearly impassible during the summer months.”

We routinely ignored this kind of language when we were younger...and you're only as old as you feel, right? Wrong.

“The nine mile stretch from Phantom Ranch to Clear Creek is south facing and consequently is in the sun from sunrise to sunset. Expect neither shade nor water for the entire length of the trail. During spring, summer, and fall months it is best to hike this trail in the extremely early morning or in the evening.”

Well. we'll get to that.

I drove up to Phoenix, picked up David at the airport, and we drove north to Flagstaff. The Sonoran Desert gave way to conifers and the temperature dropped 10 degrees. At a final stop for food and supplies we found our permit, that permit we had applied for, and paid for, and been admonished by the National Park Service to have with us at all cost or face punitive consequences…that permit, had been left lying on David’s desk in Nashua, New Hampshire. For this, fortunately for us, we have fax machines and helpful wives.
We spent the first night car camping at Mather Campground near the rim, amid families and college students, eating steak, drinking wine, taking stock, packing up.

Mather Campground

Information has made my relationship to the sun has more complex.

Nonetheless, we left Phantom Ranch too late and with insufficient water, and we didn’t figure that out until it was too late to turn back. We wasted precious and cool morning hours as I dealt with my disastrous blisters and tried to decide whether we should postpone continuing for a day. Then, an hour into the hike, after climbing the 1200 feet out of the shade and onto the Tonto platform, the sun hitting us like a fever and already well into the first water bottle, we found two bottles we had forgotten to fill. A couple of cute girls distracted us as we were filling up at the communal pump before the hike, pathetically confirming all of your male stereotypes. You’re welcome.

No Shade (The Tonto Platform) photo: David Boothby

He’s rarely so pithy.

The conversation with my feet went on for an hour and forever, the sun really got down to business, we saw no more large boulders, but we did not stop until we finally looked down on Clear Creek Campground and found another little hole to crawl into. No more water, and two miles down off the plateau to the creek: at our pace it would take us an hour or more. 20 minutes of further dessication and we started down, two raisinettes in boots and blisters, down a steep and narrow set of switchbacks across dark red dirt on a south-facing slope that had been baking all day.

Clear Creek Campsite

Clear Creek Campsite

Clear Creek, photo: David Boothby

This feeling of unease felt strangely familiar, like it had been building for a while.

It certainly hit me at the end of the first day, when we were warned about the Colorado River and its potential for menace, the example two kids who leapt from the Kaibob bridge and simply...vanished. The river suddenly felt powerful and threatening and even malicious.

It was building yesterday as we got hotter and hotter, our water dwindling with the shadows, our momentum dwindling until we simply had to stop, the recognition that we would continue to dehydrate even as we dug ourselves into an embankment to escape the sun casting an appalling shadow of futility and stupidity.

Clear Creek Campsite

To the preparations for the trip, when I realized how out of shape I was and how unlikely I was to fix it. I had been worrying for months that I wouldn’t keep up with David, who I knew to be in great condition…worrying, but too busy to attend to the issue and stupidly left with this niggling concern at the periphery of my consciousness, sapping my self-confidence.

And deeper still:

To the office, where the recent lack of success in our interviews with potential clients left me frustrated and tentative. I felt as creative as ever, and as excited about the projects as ever, but I wasn’t making these interviews successful and for the life of me I couldn’t explain why. I was losing my edge, my touch, my zing, and this creative anemia was undoing me.

Most fundamentally though was a growing sense of dread as the economy collapsed under our collective feet, a glacier of financial doom crushing opportunity and possibility and all of the idealism I try to muster every morning on my way to the office. Watching opportunities diminish frays the nerves. That I would evade obliteration seemed more and more unlikely, and the corollaries to that eventuality slowly clouded my perspective and obscured the horizon. Up and down no longer felt secure, the avenues of escape ever diminished. This hike felt like running away.

David encountered the snake later that evening. It was getting dark, we needed more water, he was heading down to the creek, and I heard only a grunt. I can’t speak for David’s state of mind, or just how close things got, but reptile and mammal managed a standoff and no harm done.

written by  roel krabbendam on May 12, 2009 from Clear Creek Campground, United States
from the travel blog: Heat
Send a Compliment

---

comment on this...

My feet felt like hamburger meat might. Somewhat abused. Yards of gauze I had been carrying for years found their calling on this trip, encasing my patties snugly. If my boots were a bit too roomy and that's why I got all those blisters now there was thankfully room for both feet and gauze.

Returning to Phantom Ranch

Returning to Phantom Ranch, photo: David Boothby