Great crack

I had had a bad night’s sleep in that log cabin. There must have been 15 or so blokes, a good proportion of whom had been snoring hard. A bell went at about 5am to announce breakfast, and most people left after that, I went back to bed as I didn’t feel the need to walk in the dark; I didn’t have a torch anyway. An hour or so later I gathered together what little stuff I had and set off.

Having left Phantom Ranch, crossing the Colorado River on the foot bridge, I was presented with a massive dark cliff wall. I was going to take the longer route out; I had come down the shorter and steeper route the previous day so I turned right. It was starting to drizzle, there was no sign of anyone around, I decided I was going to do this walk quickly. Part of the reason that a lot of the others had left so early is that the slower ones would run the risk of running out of daylight at the other end of the day, at least that’s what the bumph at Grand Canyon Village warned you about, allow 12 hours they said; I knew that they had to protect themselves from those litigious fatter people you can find over there. I wanted to be out by lunchtime so I could head off to Monument Valley.

After a short while I caught up with a medical student with the biggest rucksack in the world, I don’t know what he had in there but he mentioned something about moving house as we walked together up a gorge for five minutes or so. He was behind me when he decided that he wanted to be travelling at a slower pace and we said our goodbyes. Despite the weather being less clement than it had been on the way down it was exhilarating to be marching up that path. I only encountered a few other beings before the last few miles of zigzag which had quite a few day trippers on it. I saw a few deer that stopped chomping the grass and looked over their shoulders at me as though they felt sorry for me. I caught up with a girl with another enormous rucksack. She had a tent and a baby in hers. Amazing; she had walked into the canyon the previous day and the pair of them had spent the night. The baby was three months old and there was snow on the ground at the rim.

Most people were well equipped for the hike; on the way in though, a girl passed me coming out on the steep path; she was wearing flip flops and listening to her walkman; she had no rucksack.