Sufficiently Robust: Fifty Years of Walking in Grand Canyon

By William Cathcart-Rake

William Cathcart-Rake shares his memories of a half-century of hiking in the Grand Canyon. During that time he spent sixty days and walked five hundred miles below the rim. As he recounts his thoughts and experiences of eighteen separate treks below the rim, he includes many fascinating facts about the Canyons natural and human history. As the years go by, the author discovers that the Canyon has more to offer than just being a challenging place to hikeit becomes a sanctuary for reflection and renewal.

His time in the canyon is more than days below the rim, miles walked, switchbacks negotiated, stream crossings, walking speed, and pounds carried. Conquering the canyonan impossible and foolish questceased to be a goal. He returned to the canyon because of the effect it had on him, not because of what he could do in it or to it. The canyon allowed him to discover his ability to persevere despite discomfort, afforded an opportunity to learn more about the natural world we live in, and gave him a deeper appreciation of the need to seek the solace afforded by sauntering below the rim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450245029

William Cathcart-Rake

William Cathcart-Rake, MD, lives in Salina, Kansas, where he is a medical oncologist at the Tammy Walker Cancer Center. He spends his free time swimming, cheering on his beloved Kansas Jayhawk basketball team, learning about the Grand Canyon, and planning his next trip there.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Appendix A

Appendix B

References

For my wife Ruth and all those who have hiked with me

in the Canyon

Only by descending into the canyon may one arrive at anything like comprehension of its proportions, and the descent cannot be too urgently commended to every visitor who is sufficiently robust to bear a reasonable amount of fatigue.

—C.A. Higgins, The Titan of Chasms,

The Grand Canyon of Arizona, 1909

Acknowledgements

Friend and fellow Canyon hiker Chris Beck contributed two photographs for this book and allowed me to use several phrases from his song Take Me Back for the epigram in Chapter 18. Salina poet, novelist and writing instructor Patricia Traxler provided invaluable advice on presenting my memoirs. John Divine accompanied me on six of my Canyon treks. He made sure I returned to Grand Canyon at frequent intervals. Without his friendship, encouragement and support my story would be incomplete. Finally, I must thank my wife of nearly forty years who prompted me to record my memories, graciously allowed me to temporarily excuse myself from my duties as husband and parent to hike in Grand Canyon, and displayed extreme patience during the countless hours I spent preparing the manuscript.

Preface

Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

—John Muir (1838-1914)

In September 1996 I hiked in Grand Canyon for the ninth time. It was my sixth crossing of the Canyon via the main corridor trails. Prior to that hike, my wife Ruth urged me to keep a journal of my Canyon hikes. She also suggested that before my mental faculties totally failed, I should record memories of past experiences in Grand Canyon, imploring me to write it down and not just talk about it. Before leaving for the Grand Canyon in September 1996, I recorded memories of eight previous hikes, and I have kept a journal of all treks since then. I also have become a serious student of the Grand Canyon, learning more about its natural and human history and discovering what others have had to say about this place. The following is a formal narrative of my adventures in the Grand Canyon, a collection of my thoughts and experiences during nearly a half century of hiking in the Grand Canyon.

Although not a novice to hiking in the Grand Canyon, I am an enthusiast, not an expert. Most of my walks have been on trails accessible to hikers who are reasonably fit, possess a sense of direction and basic route finding ability, and exercise good judgment in their endeavors. This memoir is neither the musings of a naturalist nor intended to be a guidebook to hiking in the Grand Canyon, although I have referenced the U.S.G.S. quad map or maps for each of the trails I have hiked. For guidebooks to hiking in the Grand Canyon, I refer the reader to George Steck’s Hiking Grand Canyon Loops, Harvey Butchart’s classic Grand Canyon Treks: 12,000 Miles Through the Grand Canyon, Ron Adkison’s Hiking Grand Canyon National Park, and Scott Thybony’s Official Guide to Hiking the Grand Canyon. I also strongly suggest that anyone seriously interested in hiking in the Grand Canyon read Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, by Michael Ghiglieri and Thomas Myers. The Grand Canyon can be a deadly place to hike, and the authors provide details of the deaths in the Grand Canyon as well as sage advice on how to decrease the chances of tragedy during a visit.

The Canyon is a long way from my home in Kansas. There are closer places to hike in beautiful surroundings, such as the prairie of my home state and the Rockies of neighboring Colorado. Nevertheless, I keep returning to Grand Canyon—despite the physical demands of the hike, despite the pain felt after the first day of hiking, despite the heat and dust. Does Grand Canyon hold some mystery I am trying to solve? Is there something I am trying to discover about myself or prove to myself by hiking in the Canyon? I suspect both questions can be answered in the affirmative. Grand Canyon is a special place to visit, and I am blessed that I can physically walk up and down the Canyon trails. I doubt that it would have the same attraction if I were unable to hike below the rim. Although neither exceptionally blessed with athletic talent nor inordinately obsessed with the Grand Canyon, I find myself mentally and physically invigorated spending time in this place—a place that never grows old for me. I cannot survey the Canyon from the rim without wanting to hike in it.

I see something new on each visit. Changes in weather, temperature, canyon wall colors, clouds, and hiking companions make each trip different, even when I am walking a route I have taken before. I relish the physical challenge and the spiritual renewal of the hike in this huge hole in the ground, whether it be a multi-day backpacking trip or a race across the Canyon in a day. Finally, I love sharing my appreciation of the Canyon with friends and family.

Chapter 1

First Crossing (Rim-to-Rim)

August 1961

Who can adequately describe the scene?—who can describe the indescribable?

In its stupendous ensemble the spectacle is too vast for art. It is indeed almost too much for human thought. You cannot behold it for the first time without a gasp, however blasé your emotions have become by globe-trotting.

—Fitz-James MacCarthy, A Rhapsody,

Grand Canyon of Arizona, 1909

I was a skinny kid, not at all athletic, content to ride my bike short distances, splash in the community pool, play catch with my brother, and begrudgingly mow our yard with a push lawnmower. I avoided walking long distances and running any distance. Given my lack of physical prowess, I was among the last chosen for a pickup game of baseball and the first cut after basketball tryouts. My father would occasionally take my brother Tim and me to the local golf course on Sunday afternoons. Dad would hit the ball around while his sons walked behind him. Walking the course with Dad was no treat for me. I wanted to ride in an electric cart.

In 1960, shortly after my eleventh birthday, I joined a Boy Scout troop in our sleepy little southern California town of Yorba Linda, the birthplace of Richard M. Nixon. This troop disbanded a year later, and my father encouraged me to continue with Scouts by joining Troop 99, the remaining troop in town. Every summer, Troop 99 spent five to six days hiking in either the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California or the Grand Canyon of Arizona. In August 1961, the troop planned a nearly twenty-five-mile hike across the Grand Canyon. Prior to joining Troop 99, I had not walked more than two miles in one day. What made me think walking nearly twenty-five miles in six days was possible? Was I overly optimistic about my physical abilities, stupid, or just naïve? Having neither been to the Grand Canyon nor seen a picture of it, it was a great unknown.

Boys who anticipated making the Grand Canyon trip were required to make at least two conditioning hikes with the troop during the months of June and July. These hikes always started at a building called The Scout House, a small two-room structure near downtown Yorba Linda, which at the time was a small unincorporated Orange County village nestled amongst orange, lemon, and avocado groves. Yorba Linda’s main drag, appropriately named Main Street, was one block long, and all of the town’s commercial interests were located here. I can still picture the buildings lining the street: a hardware store, drug store, grocery store, weekly newspaper, five-and-dime, Masonic lodge, barbershop, beauty shop, bank, café, gift shop, gas station, Chevrolet car dealership, and Quaker church. The only other church in town, a Methodist church, was a block off Main. In the early 1960s there were no bars or liquor stores in town. The two local churches owned the sole liquor license. We had a volunteer fire department, usually called out to fight brush fires in the surrounding hills. Supposedly, a county sheriff patrolled the streets, although I never saw one. The town’s children attended Yorba Linda Elementary School for kindergarten through eighth grade. After completing eighth grade we were bussed to high school in the neighboring community of Fullerton. Yorba Linda was the quintessential great place in which to be a kid.

A half dozen other boys and I made the two mandatory hikes, each time walking about five miles with packs on our backs, camping for the night, and hiking back the next day. Our routes led us beside and through the avocado and citrus groves and barley fields surrounding town. Rows of eucalyptus trees protected the fruit trees from high winds, their leaves emitting a characteristic fragrance that I will always associate with my boyhood home. The hikes in Yorba Linda were tough for me because they involved more walking than I had ever done, and an accursed pack had to be carried as well. Fortunately, these treks did not involve steep climbs or walking in extreme heat, and I discovered that I could walk five miles in one day.

Years later, I realized the training hikes did little to prepare me physically for a Grand Canyon hike. I suspect the scoutmaster determined which boys had the physical maturity and mental toughness to take on a bigger challenge. Somehow I managed to pass the test. One final preparation for the hike started two weeks prior to our departure. We had to repeatedly paint our feet with tincture of benzoin, supposedly to toughen the skin for the long walk. The stinky liquid only stained my feet brown.

Shortly after midnight one Saturday in August 1961, we started the journey from Southern California to the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, stopping for breakfast in Las Vegas, Nevada, and lunch at Zion National Park in southern Utah. My parents, my younger brother Tim, and my younger sisters, Marilyn and Jenny, accompanied nine hikers. Besides me, the Scouts were Kenny Quinn, Les Decker, Tom Dollarhide, Wendell Iwatsuru, and Torrey Webb. Our three leaders included Bob Ackerman, Jack McDavid, and Stan (last name long forgotten). A couple of Scouts rode with my family in our old Ford station wagon, while the remainder shared space with backpacks and other camping supplies in the back of a stock truck driven by the scoutmaster, undeniably an unsafe and uncomfortable mode of transportation.

Fitz-James MacCarthy, John Muir, and others have attempted to describe the nearly indescribable landscape one encounters upon peering over the Canyon rim for the first time. My first impressions of the Grand Canyon were its vastness, its wonderful array of colors, and the silence, broken only by a rush of wind from its depths. It was one immense gash in the earth. Additional adjectives could not adequately capture the scene. I had never seen a grander place in my life, but walking across it was another issue. The night before the hike I gazed across the Canyon, the lights of Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim twinkling in the distance, and a feeling of unease surfaced. How hard would it be to walk across this ten-mile-wide, mile-deep chasm?

After a day of sightseeing and acclimation on the North Rim, we started our 23.5-mile traverse across the Canyon. After depositing hikers at the trailhead, my mother drove our car to the South Rim, while my father drove the truck. Upon reaching the South Rim my father promised to make contact with a muleskinner and arrange for shipping extra supplies by mule train to Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Canyon, where we would pick them up and use them for the second half of the hike.

Our leaders required that hikers wear long, light-weight, light-colored cotton pants (no stiff, heavy jeans), a long-sleeved white shirt, and a white pith helmet, attire designed to protect us from the intense summer sun. No markings identified us as Boy Scouts. My white shirt was a well-worn dress shirt handed down to me from my dad—a little large for me, but serviceable once I cut several inches off each sleeve. I must have brushed a half dozen coats of white enamel paint on my once khaki-colored pith helmet, the white layer meant to reflect the sun’s harsh rays. Leaving the pith helmet its original khaki color was unacceptable, according to our leaders.

This trip predated specialized backpacking stores. The boys purchased gear from army surplus stores and searched through garages and attics for usable equipment issued to their fathers during stints in the military. My pack, heavy and incredibly primitive, was basically an eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch sheet of plywood with shoulder straps (made of two-inch-wide cotton webbing) attached to one side, with eyelet screws along the edges of the other side so that we could lash our gear, stuffed in a canvas bag, to the packboard. Troop 99 had an abundant supply of these instruments of torture. These packs did not feature padded shoulder straps, hip belts, modern fabric rucksacks, or space-age metal components. Additional gear consisted of an extra pair of socks, a six-foot-by-three-foot plastic sheet to be used as a poncho and ground cloth, a light blanket, a pair of moccasins for camp use, toiletries, a bowl and spoon, and a share of the cooking equipment and food. Given this relatively small load, my best friend, Les Decker, and I buddy packed. We placed our gear in one bundle, strapped it to the packboard, and took turns carrying the load. While one of us toiled with the infernal pack, the other carried a canteen belt—an army issue web belt with four heavy steel one-quart canteens filled with water; two of the canteens nested in heavy steel canteen cups.

Les and I had few disagreements except when it came to Major League baseball. Having lived in New Jersey during his early childhood, Les followed his father’s lead and became a New York Giants fan. Mr. Decker moved the family to Yorba Linda about the same time the Giants moved to San Francisco. Although transplanted to Southern California, home of my beloved Dodgers, Les remained a Giants fan. In response to hearing about the exploits of Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Juan Marichal, I sang the praises of my heroes, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Junior Gilliam, and Maury Wills. Our rivalry remained intense yet friendly, and we were a compatible team on the Canyon hike.

After saying good-bye to my family, the troop started down the North Kaibab Trail on a warm August morning. The North Kaibab Trail (U.S.G.S. maps: Bright Angel Point, Phantom Ranch) from the North Rim down Roaring Springs Canyon to Bright Angel Canyon was completed in 1927 to replace the original route to Bright Angel Canyon—the Old Bright Angel Trail—located several miles to the northeast. The Old Bright Angel Trail followed a route used by the Indians and prospectors and was improved in 1902 by Francois Matthes, a U.S.G.S. geologist and mapmaker. The newer North Kaibab trailhead was much closer to the visitor facilities on the North Rim than the Old Bright Angel Trail.

During our descent of the North Kaibab Trail we periodically encountered mule trains carrying visitors up and down the trail. The muleskinner barked out orders for us to move to the uphill side (inside edge) of the trail and remain silent until all mules had passed. For a brief moment I felt morally superior to the mule riders. I was the purist—walking my way across the Grand Canyon, while they were riding a short distance into the canyon on a stinking mule. However, it would have taken very little encouragement for me to hop on that mule and ride the rest of the way to our destination.

Summer months are undeniably the worst months to hike in the Canyon because of the searing summer heat in the inner canyon. Daytime high temperatures regularly exceed one hundred degrees during June, July, and August, and nighttime lows rarely fall below seventy degrees. Unfortunately, because of our school schedule, summer was the only time we could make a weeklong trip. Our leaders were aware of the weather in the Canyon in August, and they made sure we carried plenty of water, rested frequently, and avoided uphill walks in the heat of the day.

The temperature rose as we descended the many switchbacks through the upper layers of the Canyon. My thighs burned from the steep downhill walk. This walk was nothing like those I had taken in Yorba Linda.

The thin straps of my pack cut into my shoulders. I swore they were made of barbed wire. Trading the pack for the canteen belt lessened the load on my back but brought no reprieve from the heat. Rest stops did not occur often enough for me. So this was what descending into hell was like. I shuffled my feet down the dusty, winding trail—kicking up red dust in the Hermit Shale, Supai Formation, and Redwall. More than one of the hikers behind me cried out, Pick up your feet.

Eat my dust, I wanted to reply.

The trail cut through the Redwall on the south side of Roaring Springs Canyon. Across the gorge water poured out of the rock wall and cascaded to the canyon floor on its way to join Bright Angel Creek and eventually the Colorado River. A lush hanging garden clung to the wall surrounding the springs. The creek formed by Roaring Springs was the largest tributary of Bright Angel Creek.

Below the Redwall the dust I generated from my shuffling gait became brown. Not far from Roaring Springs, the trail intersected Bright Angel Canyon and turned south, following a nearly straight line beside Bright Angel Creek to the Colorado River eight miles downstream. Once out of the confines of Roaring Springs Canyon we could see our final destination, the South Rim, on the far southern