roaring springs & a performance | day 7 | 838 miles
july 7th, 2015
This was supposed to be one of the toughest hikes on our trip. 12 miles down the face of the Grand Canyon wall and back up. Many people have died on this trail, and when I asked the ranger the day before, she said it was “not recommended”. She said that if I were to do it anyway, I should try to start the hike at 4 am and be back before 10 am. So that’s what I did. Since school ended, I’ve been missing that exhausted feeling you have after waking up way earlier than you should.
I packed the night before: I stuffed as many granola bars, liters of water, and apples into my pack, and by the end, that little back pack weighed close to 30 pounds. For some reason, I have really fond memories of apples on hikes. In 5th grade, my class took a trip to Yosemite for a week, and I had a major crush on one of the docents who led us around the park. She carried a sack of apples, and she would always give them out to people who were hungry.
I really started to enjoy apples on that trip. I think in one day I ate like 9 apples. I probably thought that eating a lot of apples made me macho. Anyway, there’s this rule in Yosemite — and in nature in general — that you don’t throw apple cores on the ground; you either eat the whole thing — stem, seeds, and all — or you pack it out. For some reason I thought that eating the whole apple was more appealing than carrying it out, so I began to do that, and ever since then, when I eat whole apples, I think back to that trip.
I woke up at 4, and drove a mile down the road to some trailhead I’ve never been to. Amazingly, I didn’t miss it.
So, I get out there, and it’s pretty dark, and I go to what is some trail head, and I start hiking. About a third of a mile in, I realize that I’m on the wrong trail, so I have to hike back, and find the right one. This one is it:
I decided that the best approach was to run down to the bottom, then hike my way back up. That’s usually what I do when I summit Mt. Diablo which is actually 2 miles longer and 1000 ft more change in elevation. The problem here though is the heat; temperatures can get above 100 degrees fahrenheit.
I made it down the 6 miles in about an hour, but the last 6-mile uphill took about 2 hours and 15 minutes. Pretty good since it usually takes most people 5–6 hours to do the whole thing. The destination of the trail was kind of anti-climactic, but it was nice:
Something you learn when you do long hikes is that you kind of go crazy. You start singing to the world, and you get amazed at the beauty that nature displays for us. You have weird thoughts, and you think about people that you haven’t for a long time. But that’s kind of nice because that’s what it means to be alone. You just kind of admire things and yourself and the memories you’ve had.
One of the particularly funny thoughts I remember was about mule shit. The first few miles of the trail are shared with mule-ride tours, which is pretty annoying because not only do you have to stand out of the way and let them pass — which takes like 3 minutes — but you also have to deal with their poop on the trail, which smells terrible. I didn’t really notice it that much on the way down because it was cold and dark, but on the way up, it was something awful.
I don’t know if you’ve ever truly experienced conflicted feelings until you smell, see, and walk through mule shit on the ascent of the Grand Canyon. Mule shit is god-awful. It smells even worse than people poop because it sits out in the sun all day, as if it were getting broiled for the flies that infest the little piles of food-shelter. So when you walk by them — inevitably — the flies think that you want to steal their broiled feast-home and they scatter all over the place like anchovies trying to convince a shark not to eat them. Believe me, I do not want to touch you.
But on the ascent back up to the rim of the canyon, I could not have been happier to see those magnificent piles of greenish-brown gold, but the riches they gave me were not monetary; instead, they were motivational treasures, rewarding me for the hard work I had already invested. That mule shit told me that I was getting closer and closer to breakfast. The funny thing was that the closer I got to breakfast, the more I lost my appetite.
But I made it to breakfast, and I ate more than I should have: 2 bowls of oatmeal with strawberries and 4 omelets. Yum.
After breakfast, grandpa and I sat down to enjoy the view below, and you would have thought that he was the one who took the hike.
For dinner we decided to go to a Grand Canyon cookout to take complete advantage of the western atmosphere, so we got on a faux-train, and made our way to the dinner show.
The experience wasn’t amazing, but it was beautiful. Not just because we were sitting outside eating great BBQ and listening to live country music, but also because of the couple who preformed in the operation.
Apparently, it was their anniversary, yet they still played the show. You should have seen the way they preformed together. You could see that they were just in love as they were the day they were married. They didn’t have great or busy lives. They had happy lives, and being together made that even more true. All too often, we don’t appreciate the fantastic people in our lives; because they’re exactly the people who care so much about us, we think that we don’t need to care for them, that they will always be there for us. But that’s not true. Age catches up; people change.
Maybe if we could forget all of our selfish needs and ambitions, we too could sing with our loved ones and honor the simplest gift we can give anyone: our time.
