Dropping Below the Rim: Backpacking in the Grand Canyon

Mid-March 2025: There are places on the planet that have a mythical feel to each of us; which places have that feel are different for you and me, but in general they are places that are far away, are exotic from the standpoint of our experience and, for me, they must be difficult to reach.  I had never been to the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and it has always had that feel.  I have long wanted to trek down to the river, and spend a few days hiking along it to experience time along this flow that gives life to so many.

Without being expressly so, this was a bucket list hike.  At my age, everything that is not in the immediate vicinity of Bozeman can be characterized as such.  I have started working hard to fill in some blank spaces on my map.  Last year, Jeremy and I trekked across Zion Park, this year I was dropping into the Grand Canyon solo.  Winters in the north are too cold and the snow too deep to hike, so it makes sense to look south.  But, while there is lots of land down in the southwest to trek through, there is little water: Zion had enough, the Canyon, as I was about to find out, had little.

I started as far east in the park as I could go while easily accessing hiking trails that allowed me to descend to the Colorado and start moving west.  Heavy snow had blanketed the area only a few days earlier, and the first mile of trail was slick with packed snow and ice.  The precipitation had brought the desert to life.  The show was not ostentatious, the desert doesn’t allow for that, but there were flowers, and brightly colored fresh leaves and stems that provided crisp contrast to the reds, purples and browns of the stone. 

I met a few hikers going up, none that were going down, but when I reached Tanner Beach, my destination for the night on the Colorado, there were backpackers all about.  I found a spot to set up, made camp and dinner, said hi to the four guys in the camp next to mine and laid down for the night.  As with most travel, the past few days had been busy.  I had been counting on that.  What I hadn’t counted on was getting sick.  Something, a head or chest cold most likely, had begun beating me down. 

I felt it coming on before I dropped off the rim, but plans were set, and chances to make trips like this are so few.  If I bailed because I was feeling ill, would I have a chance to come back?  It took me 67 years to get to this spot.  It’s a lot of preparation and expense to pull trips like this off, so here I was, finally on the Colorado, but laid out in my tent with a stuffed head, contemplating every time I blew my nose whether my toilet paper supply would last.  Ugh!

Crappy as I felt, I was not disappointed by either the canyon or the river.  Trekking in the canyon required more from me than I understood when I started out.  I was in the desert, but I hadn’t yet developed a desert mindset.  In the desert, it is said, your closest water is always the last water you found.  It wasn’t until day four of the trip, when I was nearly caught out without water, that I started to internalize this.  I started the day hiking along the Tonto trail and leaving the Colorado behind with only two liters.  I was 7 miles along the trail when I passed a trickle of water without stopping.  I had five more miles to go to Cottonwood Camp, my planned stop for the night, and figured I had just enough water to make it.  Luckily, a short time later, I ran into two other hikers coming from the opposite direction who told me that Cottonwood Creek was dry.  Even hiking for days through miles of dry washes where the only visible water outside that one trickle was the Colorado, I was still expecting Cottonwood Creek to be a healthy running stream.  I had a lot to learn.

Day 2 was the day I had been most excitedly waiting for.  I was planning to hike the full Escalante Route, a 12 mile stretch that starts and ends at the Colorado, though, as I could see on map and was about to experience, didn’t stay with the river for long.  In this deep canyon, there are many places where walls drop straight down into the Colorado.  The trail climbs above these walls and then confronts the washes that dissect the walls.  The washes cut deep canyons of their own, sometimes with hundreds of feet of sheer cliffs, and the trail works its way up the washes until it reaches their “headwaters,” and the trail can cross.  In one instance, 75-Mile creek, the trail dropped into the head of the wash.  My map wasn’t clear on this and the trail appeared to continue around the wash.  I got lost for a few miles, far longer than I should have, before finally having to backtrack and drop into 75-Mile creek.  I dropped in not because I had figured out that it was the right way to go, but because I had seen a boater who was out for a hike drop into it.  I knew there was river access and boaters to chat with down that canyon. 

Getting lost sucked, but since I knew that I had a way out, I was able to keep my wits about me.  I added myself to the boaters’ camp for the night at the foot of 75-Mile creek.  It had been a 13-mile day with lots of difficult trekking, but walking into that camp helped.  They gave me a chair to sit in, fed me REAL food, and offered me a beer.  They were great folks.  I found myself wishing I were better so that I could more fully engage with them. 

A big part of my trips is trying to figure out the story I will have tell once it is over.  I love hiking along and mulling story ideas.  Other than this group, I found few folks to engage with and test out story lines, and while I did notice the beauty of the canyon, I also spent lots of time thinking about my earaches, sore throat, and dwindling supply of toilet paper.

Short on story ideas, I turned to the bookstore once I exited the canyon.  I had read John Wesley Powell’s “The Canyons of the Colorado,” a couple of decades ago.  It is an impressive recounting of the first explorations of the canyon.  This time I picked up Kevin Fedarko’s “A Walk in the Park.”  It is a rich tale about his transect of the Grand Canyon from its eastern most edge at Lee’s Ferry to where it fades out at Grand Wash cliffs, some 800 hiking miles to the west.  I learned that there is a small group of individuals that devote much of their free time to exploring the vast reaches of the canyon climbing peaks and exploring routes to go up and down; water is always an issue, knowing routes to the Colorado is essential for survivial.  Most of the canyon has no trails, all of it bakes for much of the year, and there is little water away from the Colorado.  I learned that few individuals have completed an entire transect.  It is much more difficult that hiking the AT, the PCT or the CDT. 

In the end I had to shorten my trek, from the 60 miles I had planned over 5 days to 35 miles.  By Day 3, I was too sick to hike more than a few miles and instead spent a beautiful afternoon resting at the camp at Hance Rapids on the Colorado.  This started me thinking that I needed to come back, to complete the trek I had planned and to add another few days of trekking.  One quickly gets why some have devoted much of their lives to this vast untamed wilderness.  Unlike most national parks, this one has few backcountry signs, and, as I discovered at 75-Mile creek, it doesn’t even have cairns marking key turning points.  It allows you to get lost if you are unprepared for the challenge.  I would like to come back to meet the challenge of at least another relatively tame trip in the canyon.  Hopefully, my bucket list has room.