Grand Canyon (Nankoweap Trail): Dec 2021

 At the very beginning of December 2021, Tom and I, together with our Canadian friends Nirmal and Nicole, spent five nights (six days) backpacking Nankoweap Trail off Grand Canyon's North Rim.  This is considered to be the hardest named trail in all of Grand Canyon, and in this it did not disappoint.  We didn't get to do everything we had planned, but it was an enjoyable hike nonetheless.

The Trail

Going just by the summary numbers, other than its length (14 miles from trailhead to river), Nankoweap doesn't seem any worse than other Grand Canyon trails: for example, its 4,840' elevation change from rim to river works out to an average drop of about 346 feet per mile; by contrast, Bright Angel Trail, with an average drop of 438 feet per mile (4,380' over 10 miles) seems quite a bit steeper.  Why, then, is this considered the hardest named trail in GCNP?

Of course, the summary numbers don't tell the full story.  There are actually two different things going on: steepness and exposure.

First, steepness.  Nankoweap's elevation profile looks like this (thanks to Tom Hickey for pointing this out to me):

For more than 11 out of its total 14 mile length (8.5 miles from the trailhead to Tilted Mesa, three miles from Nankoweak Creek down to the Colorado), Nankoweap Trail isn't particularly steep.  It sort of just moseys along: the campsite above Tilted Mesa, for example, 8.5 miles into the hike, is at almost the same elevation as the trailhead.  The action is all in the section from Tilted Mesa down to Nankoweap Creek, where the trail drops about 3,300' over 2.5 miles: a breathtaking 1,320 feet per mile!  There are sections where just looking down at what seems to be a near-vertical plunge of the trail is enough to weaken one's resolve.  This is, of course, reversed on the way back up the trail, when "breathtaking" takes on an entirely different meaning.

The second challenge is exposure.  For much of the "mosey-along" traverse of the Supai—from just below the canyon rim all the way to just above Tilted Mesa—the trail is narrow (often less than a foot wide), with a cliff rising steeply on one side and a cliff falling away steeply on the other.  Depending on one's sensitivity to vertiginous dropoffs, one's reaction to this can range from nonchalance to white-knuckled terror; for the same reason, one person's sincere "It's not too bad" assessment of the trail can come across to someone else as wildly inaccurate maybe to the point of lying.

This hike, it turned out, had a lot of character-building in the works.  But we didn't know that when we started out.

Day 0: Getting to the Trailhead

I picked up Nirmal and Nicole at their hotel near Sky Harbor Airport, rendezvous'd with Tom at Sunset Point Rest Stop, and headed north towards highway 89A.  We had planned to have a late lunch along the way, but the restaurant was closed and, wanting some daylight to set up camp, we decided not to wait.  FS 8910, the dirt road leading to the trailhead, was in worse shape than I remembered from our last visit, and my Honda Accord struggled at times.  

We reached the trailhead a little before dusk and quickly set up our tents at a campsite nearby.  Dinner was abbreviated.  The night was expected to be cold, so our preparations for the next day's hike—including packing enough water for a dry camp the following evening—included moving our water into our tents so that they didn't freeze overnight.  Tom started a fire, a little puddle of light in the dark night, that helped warm us.  We were all tired and didn't stay up very late. 

Days 1 and 2: Trailhead to Nankoweap Creek

We were up at 5 and had our packs on by 7:30.  The trail soon headed downhill towards a creek, meandered along the creekbed for a little while, then headed uphill towards the base of Saddle Mountain and the edge of the rim, about a thousand feet above us.  We reached the rim around 11, took a short break to catch our breaths and enjoy the view, then headed down into the canyon.

The hike felt like hard work; it didn't help that I felt tired (surprisingly so considering the relatively gentle slope of the trail), possibly because of the skimpy dinner the night before.  

We reached Marion Point around 2, sat around for a bit, then set up camp.  Nicole was skeptical at first about pitching tents on a tiny postcard-sized campsite with cliffs falling away steeply on three sides, but eventually got used to the idea (the lack of any plausible alternatives may have been a persuading factor).

The rest of the afternoon was lazy.  We had an early dinner.  The temperature dropped quickly as soon as the sun went behind the cliffs.  Between the cold and our fatigue, we didn't wait around very long—I was in my tent by 5:30.

The next morning we were on the trail around 8.  It's a little less than six miles from Marion Point to Nankoweap Creek, and I'd figured that if we could sustain an average hiking speed of 1 mph, and accounting for breaks along the way, we'd get to the creek no later than 3.  But we moved slower than expected, and took 3 1/2 hours to cover the three miles to the top of Tilted Mesa.  Nirmal and Nicole weren't happy about the exposure along the Supai traverse, but pushed through with grim (and admirable) determination.  We descended slowly and carefully through the Redwall, and again down a long steep section through the Muav layer, and the shadows were beginning to lengthen by the time the trail began to flatten out towards the bottom.  The effects of fatigue were beginning to show: Nicole stumbled and fell at one point, hurting an ankle and knee.  

Daylight was waning by the time we reached Nankoweap Creek around 4:30.  We had enough light to set up our tents and purify some water before dark, but dinner was by the light of our headlamps.  I was in my tent by 6:30.

Days 3 and 4: Nankoweap Creek

Our original plan had been to hike up Kwagunt Canyon on Day 3 and back to Nankoweap over the Kwagunt-Nankoweap Saddle on Day 4.  At dinner the previous evening we'd agreed that this was perhaps too ambitious, and (since our backcountry permit had us over in Kwagunt Canyon on Night 3) settled instead on the plan of hiking over to Kwagunt Canyon along the river, then back the same way the following day—in effect cutting out the strenuous hike over the saddle while still staying legal with our permit.  But lying in my tent that morning, the more I thought about this the more convinced I became that, from a health and safety point of view, the prudent thing to do would be to rest and recuperate.  There were no howls of protest when I proposed this, and so the decision was made: we would make this an easy day, stay where we were, give our bodies plenty of horizontal time to recover; the day's hike would be to go down to the Colorado and visit the Granaries.

We began the day lazily, beginning the walk to the river around 10 and moseying down Nankoweap Creek slowly.  There was a little water in the creek, but enough room in the wide and flat and sandy bed to make for a very pleasant walk (though at one point I tripped on a fallen yucca stem and landed open-handed on a clump of prickly pear, ruining a perfectly good glove in the process).  We came across three or four people from rafting parties hiking upstream, but otherwise had the place to ourselves.  

We reached the Granaries a little after 1, and after hanging out and enjoying the view for a while, headed back down to the creek and towards camp.  The hike back was quicker, possibly motivated by the fading daylight.  We reached camp just as the sun was setting.  To my relief, I didn't see any citation for being camped in the wrong area.  The rest of the evening was very pleasant and relaxed.  

One odd thing we noticed was the behavior of a pair of birds—what I later found were black-headed grosbeaks—right by our campsite.  As we moved around camp in the morning they was flitting around in the bushes, rustling the leaves loudly.  When we returned to camp late that afternoon, many hours later, they were still rustling around that same little spot of ground, chirping loudly all the while.  This behavior was puzzling—especially the incessant loud chirping, which drew attention to them and surely expended a good deal of energy in a place where food couldn't have been plentiful.  Possibly we were camped too close to their nest?  

The next day—the fourth day of our hike, and our last at Nankoweap Creek—was, by general consensus, an "in camp" rest day.  The morning began lazily, with everyone enjoying the warmth and comfort of their tents, no one in a hurry to be up and about.  This lack of urgency gave me the rare luxury of being able to lie back and listen to the sounds around me.  Closest, of course, just a few feet away from my tent, were the grosbeaks, who had been kicking up a ruckus since sunrise (digging? foraging for bugs?) in the same little thicket of bushes.  Further away, in the background, was the soft burbling of Nankoweap Creek.  Every so often a dead cottonwood leaf would drift down from a nearby tree and slide down the side of my tent, rustling softly like slow-motion rain.  We spent most of the day relaxing by the creek, enjoying the cloudless blue sky and soaking in the gentle winter sunlight. 

The rest day eased our aches but didn't erase all the pain.  Some time after dinner, as we were going about various chores around camp, I said something about how wonderful it was to have encountered so few other people.  Nicole responded that that was because "only very few hikers would be stupid enough to come to this place."  In mute wonder I gazed at the cliffs surrounding us soaring to the sky, luminous in the light of the setting sun.

Days 5 and 6: Nankoweap Creek to Trailhead

We were up by 4:30 and on the trail heading out of Nankoweap Creek a little after 6.  Initially we hiked by the light of our headlamps, able to see only the small illuminated area in front of our feet.  Little by little the bland darkness around us took shape: first the cliff and hills in the distance, silhouetted faintly across the faintly lightening sky; then, closer by, clots and blobs that slowly resolved into rocks and bushes and trees.  By 7 we had our headlamps off.  The air was cool and the hiking delightful.  We reached the campsite above Tilted Mesa around mid-day.  There was no particular enthusiasm among the group to keep hiking to the next plausible campsite at Marion Point, so after sitting around for a bit and having lunch, we set up camp.  I lay in my tent, warmed by the mellow sunshine, and may have snoozed for a while.

Much to my astonishment, I found I had a cell signal.  Somewhat guiltily I checked my email and the news headlines; the takeaway was that, as far as I could tell, the world had gotten by just fine in my absence.

As on the other days of this trip, the temperature dropped quickly once the sun dropped behind the cliffs.  I stayed up a little bit watching the western sky change color.  The crags and canyons below us slowly lost shape and faded into darkness.  A very thin sliver of moon appeared above Mt. Hayden.  I headed into my tent; the time was 5:30.

The plan the next morning was to hit the trail by 7, right around sunrise.  When I began packing up my gear around 5:30, it was pitch dark with what seemed like a billion glittering jewels strewn across the sky; the familiar constellations were all there, old friends keeping me company as I went about my mundane chores.  

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the sky over to the east lightened and a faint horizon appeared.  Gradually, very gradually and in utter still silence, shapes began to emerge from the undifferentiated darkness: mesas and buttes and gullies first; then, closer by, trees, rocks, and scrub bushes.  Then, over a span of maybe fifteen minutes, the eastern sky exploded with purple and orange and red, lighting up a few thin wisps of cloud that hung low in the sky, like a celestial celebration of Holi.  The sun finally popped above the horizon just as we shouldered our packs and began hiking.  Suddenly there were shadows.  The Supai cliffs above us glowed a luminous red-gold.  Morning had broken, like the first morning.

The hiking was a lot easier at this point: our packs were a lot lighter (no more food, no extra water for dry camps), and the trail ambled along agreeably with none of the ferocious uphill slog of the previous day.  I found myself hanging back, both to take pictures at my leisure but also to enjoy the silence and solitude of the Canyon on the last day of our trip.

 The trail wound its way through the Supai layer, just as exposed as it had been on our way down a few days ago but somehow not quite so fearsome.  The rock turrets above Marion Point gradually grew larger.  We reached Marion Point around 11, paused briefly for lunch, then resumed the hike.  A thin veil of clouds filtered just enough of the weak sunshine to make for a perfect hiking temperature.  The Canyon was hazy with what seemed to be smoke, maybe from a prescribed burn somewhere.  We reached the rim a little after 1.  After a short break we headed downhill towards the trailhead.  Those last three miles were easy but seemed interminable.  But little by little the miles fell away; we reached our cars around 3:30 pm.