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The Grand Canyon - Rim to Rim to Rim in a Day

Did I hike over 45 miles in a day just because it nicely coincided with a nail polish launch?  Perhaps.

 The inspiration for the Grand Canyon polish was the deep, dusty blue color on the distant rim of the canyon, since my goal was to get "over there" and back on a hike.

 

But I'd actually been planning this trip for years. 7 years, to be exact.  In 2017 I had a weekend picked out that I was planning on going. I used to get 4-day weekends back then due to working part-time as a mountain guide and part-time at an engineering firm.  Then my car died, and I had to replace it, and by the time I had that all sorted out, the window of good (cool) weather while the North Rim still had water was over.  Almost every year after that, I'd think about how I wanted to do it, swear I was going to train for it, and then do approximately 3-5 runs on a "training plan" before falling off the wagon.

For some reason, I found that a polish launch was sufficient motivation to try it anyway.  No specific training, knowing that I wasn't going to perform amazingly like all the trail runners who make YouTube videos about doing it in just a few hours.  My goal was just to survive and be in pretty okay condition the next day.  The inclusion of a Grand Canyon polish in the most recent National Parks launch was the motivation I needed to finally try.

The Grand Canyon Rim to Rim to Rim (or R2R2R) is unique from most hikes I do in that if you choose to abort mission, you've still got to go uphill to get back to your car.  On a mountain, it's almost always much easier to turn around and start heading back.  Going into a canyon like this is more committing.  So I committed.

I've decided to stop overthinking my activities and analyzing them to death after the fact, so I don't really know how I feel about starting at 3 am vs midnight, and I also don't really care.  I think either way would have been fine.  I would maybe just barely have finished in daylight had I started at midnight, but I would have been hiking for about 6 hours in darknesss before the sun came up.  Instead, starting at 3 am, I split it into two periods of hiking in darkness, but unfortunately the timing worked out such that I wasn't hiking on the South Rim in daylight at all.  It would have been nice to see that, but maybe I'll go back sometime and do a more relaxed hike of just the South Rim trails.

I've also decided to stop dwelling on every little detail of the process during activities, since I've come to the realization that I will never be an outdoor blogger who people are looking to for advice on hiking.  So the short version of my R2R2R adventure is as follows.

I started from the Bright Angel Trailhead at 3 am.  My plan was to do this slightly longer trail (by about 2 miles each direction) rather than the South Kaibab trail in order to try and save my knees.  It's theoretically possible, and often recommended online, to go down Bright Angel and then up South Kaibab.  However, this requires you to be on the South Rim when the shuttles are running.  I wasn't about to plan a mostly-nighttime hike just to make sure I was back up at the rim well before 9 pm, and since the walk from one trailhead to the other was more than the difference between the two trails, I thought going down and up the same trail was the best option.

It took me about 3 hours to get to Phantom Ranch, at the bottom of the canyon.  There was some water line construction going on, and the lights from that looked like some kind of fantasy villain fortress in the dark.

As you can see there, it was just starting to get light as I reached the bottom.  By the time I'd refilled my water and had a snack, it was light enough to put my headlamp away before continuing up the North Rim.

The first 8-9 miles of the North Rim were by far my favorite part of the hike.  I was happy that I'd been able to maximize my daylight on that side.  For the first couple miles, the trail winds through a narrow part of canyon with minimal view out the top.

This gradually widened to a view that looked a lot more like walking between peaks in the mountains, rather than being down inside a canyon.

I was actually kind of surprised how little it felt like being down at the bottom of the largest canyon in the country.

After about 9 miles, the trail turns up a steeper incline and becomes more strenuous for 5 more miles to the North Rim.  I had reached this point about 9:30 am and was feeling good about my time - just over 3 hours from Phantom Ranch.  Then the last 5 miles took me another 3 hours, when I was hoping it would take more like 2.

I reached the North Rim at 12:30 and decided that since I had no hope of finishing in daylight, I should take my time and really rest/recover as much as possible before starting back.  I spent about an hour there making sure I was rehydrated and eating lots of snacks.

Next up was the part I'd been most looking forward to - going back down the North Rim.  I really enjoyed this section, although it would have been nicer if it weren't so hot.  I'd planned my trip for the very last day before North Rim amenities start shutting down for the winter, including water at the trailhead.  It just happened to be unseasonably warm this time of year, and while I was expecting it to be cooler on the North Rim (it's a couple thousand feet higher than the South Rim), it felt like it got warm again immediately below the rim.

I was concerned that the steeper downhills toward the tops of each rim were going to give me knee problems - I'd recently been on a "practice" hike where my knees got quite sore going downhill.  I have no idea what I did, but miraculously my knees felt completely fine the entire time.

Back at the turnoff where the trail flattens out toward the bottom of the canyon, I was finally starting to feel tired.  I was coming to the realization that I still had another 10 miles of this enjoyable, nearly flat trail and then after that, 8 miles of pretty steep uphill.  I had been out for 13 hours and had hiked 28 miles with 6500 feet of elevation gain, and I was still facing 18 miles and 2500 feet of elevation, which by itself would be a pretty big activity for a day.

Unfortunately, the only way out was up.  If I'd actually been injured or sick, I could have found help from other hikers, and probably gotten up to the North Rim and gotten a ride back.  But nothing was wrong, I was just getting the Very Big Day I signed up for. The hike back along the flatter part of the trail was so beautiful - I wished it were possible to just do that section, because I would absolutely come back for that.  I'm still currently unconvinced it's worth hiking 8 miles down into the canyon and then 8 miles back out to access, but maybe I'll have changed my mind the next time I'm there.

I arrived back at Phantom Ranch about half an hour after dark.  In the moment, I was pretty disappointed that I was going to be doing the South Rim entirely in the dark, when I'd been hoping to get at least part way up before the sun went away.  I stopped only briefly to refill water and have a snack before starting up again.  My headlamp batteries died and I was very happy that I'd brought a backup - I don't think I've ever gone through a fresh set of batteries in a single activity before.

The first couple miles uphill was going great. Then I started slowing down dramatically. I had filled my Camelbak with a very dilute electrolyte mixture (mostly to mask the taste of the canyon water) but just sipping on that was making me feel sick. Eventually it occurred to me that it had been a couple hours since I ate anything.  I stopped around halfway up to the rim, near the ranger station and campground, and ate some GU gel in addition to drinking more water.  Within a few minutes I magically (through the magic of physiology) felt better, and for the remainder of the hike up I was stopping to eat a gel every half hour or so.

I got back to the trailhead just after midnight, but felt relatively fine, just tired.  I slept at my campground for about 6 hours before waking up again, still feeling fine.  I was expecting some horrible soreness or injury to slowly flare up over the next day, but nothing happened.  The only effects from it were some blisters, which were much better than the blisters I'd gotten on my 40-mile Yosemite hike in early September.  I had actually put "prophylactic bandaids" on in those spots, and I think they worked, but at some point during the hike all of them had come off my feet and were instead stuck to my socks.

The numbers according to Strava.  The distance was definitely overestimated by ~5% or so; it should have been 46-47 miles.

I finished the hike with very mixed feelings, because for years I'd envisioned myself doing this as a super disciplined athlete who stuck to a training program and crushed the eventual goal.  After processing for a couple days though, I realized I was proud of the accomplishment, and I'm simply not a disciplined athlete.  Just an average person who enjoys spending ridiculously long days on my feet.