10/11 -- Hiking the Grand Canyon Rim Trail and Recovering

We are still waking up early, and it worked to our advantage today. We got to the cafe for breakfast and internet by 7am, and were ready to check out and explore by 8:15am. We were unable to reserve 2 nights in our park hotel and have another reservation just outside for this evening, but it didn't slow us down at all.  After some discussion, we decided to take the shuttle bus to the far western end of the Rim Trail, which is at least 7 miles from the western area of the Grand Canyon Village, where most of the services are.

Look at how the tree has twisted

The ride to Hermit's Rest took about 40 minutes, with lots of stops to let people off. The shuttle is the only way to get there except during winter, but works very nicely because then you can hike one way and get picked up at one of the drop off points when you get tuckered out. Although the average altitude is about 7000 feet, and we are not exactly altitude-adapted after only part of one day, it is mostly flat so it didn't seem too awful to hike several miles. Our first theory was that we could walk all the way back -- 7 miles in 2.5 hours to allow for photos and altitude. However, as we walked, we discovered that all our little side trips to view points were adding up and we had logged 5.5 miles in about 2.5 hours, and we still had at least 3 or 4 miles to go. Plus a couple up hill sections around 11, as breakfast started to wear off, really took the stuffing out of me. So we bailed and took the shuttle back. By the time we walked to a restaurant for lunch, I was running on fumes and plans for another 2-mile wander after lunch basically evaporated.

Part of the Abyss

We got to see parts of the canyon that neither of us had seen before, including an area they call the Abyss, where the walls fall straight down for 3000-4000 feet, as opposed to the more step-like decline elsewhere. The trail started out for 3 miles as a paved path, but changed to gravel after that, positioned near the rim. We spied a gravel trail in a couple places on the second part of the paved path, and started out on them, as they looked more scenic, and frankly, walking along the canyon on an asphalt path seems kind of contrary to the whole hiking concept. The first gravel section we saw was right ON the edge and sloped toward it and you had to duck a tree which forced you closer to the edge. I nixed that and we went back to the path, but later we saw another path that looked safer and headed out. Jim noticed, after we had been on it for some time, that it was heading downward consistently, and we had a target area that was much higher than we were and getting worse. We wondered if we had stumbled onto a trail that went to the bottom, which was totally beyond our capability to get back up, so we hoofed it cross country to get back to the paved path. Later, looking back the way we came, we could see where we probably were and it did not go all the way to the bottom. My guess is that it was an unauthorized trail created by people who like asphalt paths as much as we do.

A wider section of the rim-side path...

 

 

 

Jim at one of the lookouts

Tarantula? It was about 3 inches across -- small for
a tarantula, but big and hairy for a spider

We saw more deer and elk from the car and shuttles. Jim spied an eagle from the Rim Trail and we saw a really big hairy spider along the Rim Trail -- maybe a baby tarantula??

Lunch had a relatively rejuvenating effect on me, so we went to the Geology Museum and stumbled into a ranger talk about how the Grand Canyon was formed. She was really entertaining and played to the school kids in the audience. Basically, the very bottom of the canyon is 'basement rock', an igneous rock that is interleaved with granite. On top are lots of layers of sedimentary rock -- limestone, mudstone, and sandstone, that suggest the area was an inland sea 8 different times over the last 550 million years. Then the plateau was uplifted, but as a flat whole, not like the tilted rocks you see in lots of other places. There are lots of fossils in the sediment, but the top 250 million years worth of sediments have all disappeared, worn away by wind and water erosion so there are no dinosaur fossils. The Colorado river settled on its current channel about 6 million years ago, and has consistently been about 300 feet wide, cutting its way deeper and deeper into the rock. The river falls 14,000 feet from its source in the Rockies to its output in the Pacific, giving it a lot more force than the Mississippi, which only falls 2000 feet from Minnesota to Louisiana. Combined with the dessert climate, which has monsoon style rainfalls for 2 months each summer, the upper layers that river initially cut have been further eroded over the last 6 million years by wind and water to be the 10 miles wide you currently see.

After that, we drove to the main Visitor Center (kind of short on information) and walked to nearby Mather Point for our last outlook to the canyon before heading to our hotel for the night.

Hard to believe that ribbon of a river is 300 ft wide, but
it is about a mile down.

Our grand adventure is nearly over -- we are 795 miles from home and heading out tomorrow. Based on where we will probably be by 5 or 6pm, a typical stopping time, we may just tough it out and go all the way home. In some ways I am glad to be going home -- tired of living out of a suitcase and with the limited clothing selection I guessed at 7 weeks ago. But this adventure has been such a hoot in so many ways, it's a shame it is almost over.