Grand Canyon (Nankoweap Trail): March 2015

The Nankoweap Trail, off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, is considered to be the "most difficult of the named trails in Grand Canyon."  In March 2015, Herman, Tom, and I spent six days on a backpacking trip into the Grand Canyon down this trail.

We set out from Tucson early on March 15.  It's a long drive to the North Rim: up I-10 and then I-17 through Phoenix to Flagstaff, then north along Rte 89 and Rte 89A to Lee's Ferry, where we crossed the Colorado (putting us to the north of the river), then west along 89A for a while before heading south down a long dirt road to get to the trailhead at the boundary of the wilderness area.  We expected to get there by mid-afternoon, and the plan was to hike part of the way to the Canyon rim the rest of the afternoon and camp, so we could drop down into the Canyon with a minimum of wasted time the next day.

One implication of this plan was that we needed to set out from the trailhead with enough water for two dry camps.  This made for heavy packs: they weighed in at around 65 lbs each when we started out.  It's about 3.5 miles and 800 uphill feet from the traihead to the rim, and between the weight of the packs and the elevation (6,800' to 7,600') it was slow going.  We decided to camp about half a mile from the rim.  A stiff breeze sprang up as we began setting up camp, making the process of pitching tents more interesting than usual.  But camp was set up soon enough, and after a quick dinner I curled up inside my sleeping bag, snug and dry and content, as the wind howled outside the tent and drove the pitter-patter of a light drizzle before it.  I don't think I lay awake very long.

Day 1

We woke up a little before dawn and began getting ready for the day: putting away our sleeping bags, packing up our gear, getting breakfast ready by the light of a headlamp.  This would be my third trip down Nankoweap Trail, and yet the anticipation and excitement (and, yes, nervousness) was just as sharp and vivid as the very first time.  The sky gradually lightened to the east, and the darkness around us slowly sorted itself out into silhouettes that solidified into trees.  Not long after it was light enough to see the trail, we were on the move.

The view from the rim

The "stumbling upon" the Canyon rim on this trail always catches me by surprise.  There you are, hiking among the pine trees, then all of a sudden the land falls away abruptly, opening up this absolutely stunning vista.  Even though I know what to expect by now, that first glimpse never fails to take my breath away!

After a brief pause to enjoy the view, we dropped down below the rim.  The trail drops intimidatingly steeply at first through a rugged rocky stretch, but soon settles into a long traverse across the red Supai sandstone.  The hiking is quite pleasant, with steep cliffs on one side of the trail, stunning views of the entire Nankoweap valley on the other.

Vista from Nankoweap Trail

A significant milestone along the way, about three miles in from where we dropped down below the rim, is Marion Point, a long fin of rock that juts out into the canyon.  There's a nice little flat spot at the top with room for some tents, and we had camped there on a previous trip; this time we just paused a little bit to admire the view and kept going.

Marion Point

The Park Services's trail description for Nankoweap emphasizes how exposed it is in places ("This trail is not recommended for people with a fear of heights"), and this first becomes evident near Marion Point.  The trail narrows to a little track, no more than a foot wide, with sheer rock cliff rising vertically on one side and sheer rock cliff dropping vertically on the other.  It's not for the faint of heart!

Cliff in the Supai

Exposure

By mid-afternoon we were down to just above Tilted Mesa.  I was feeling a little tired from the heat by now, and there was a nice flat-ish area here with the next decent camping spot quite a bit further down, so we decided to stop and camp.  There were some juniper trees that gave just enough shade for us to sit and relax and sip a little drambuie and enjoy the silence and the view.

As the day wound down and the shadows gradually lengthened in the softening light, the texture of the landscape began to come into relief.  In the near distance in front of us, Tilted Mesa slanted off to the left; beyond that unfolded a crazy corrugation of canyons and ridges and buttes: Kwagunt, Malgosa, Awatubi.   Little by little the shadows crept across the land.  The clouds to the west caught fire, briefly, before darkness fell and the stars came out.

Day 2

It was still dark outside when I awoke.  It was wonderfully comfy and cozy inside the sleeping bag and I really didn't want to get out and start getting ready for the day, but I could hear Tom and Herman moving around in their tents and knew I couldn't procrastinate for much longer.  Once over the initial inertia, though, the morning routine—packing stuff up, making breakfast, taking down camp—was a familiar one and moved along smoothly.

Dawn broke as we were eating breakfast: at first just a lightening of the eastern horizon, then a pinpoint of light that grew rapidly as the sun came over the horizon.  The red Supai sandstone almost glowed in the golden early-morning sunlight, the colors and shadows changing from one moment to the next as the sun rose.  It was mesmerizing.

The trail steepened quickly as we began hiking.  The descent through the Redwall limestone, which we reached fairly soon, was particularly memorable.  We lost elevation briskly: there were a few stretches of relatively mellow traversal along with several ridiculously steep descents made even more interesting by the loose rocky trail.  Unfortunately, part of the way down, Herman  took a nasty fall when he stepped on a rock that rolled under his foot, and took a hard bang to the head.  This was our second mishap on this trail: on another trip a few years earlier, our friend Jim came within a few feet of becoming a Grand Canyon statistic when he slipped and slid on a section of loose scree just above a high cliff not too far from where Herman fell.

Marion Point seen from above Tilted Mesa	The descent through the Redwall

We reached Nankoweap creek around mid-morning.  We had been hiking for only a few hours, but the sun was warm enough that it felt good to sit and rest in the shade of a cottonwood tree.  Herman was feeling OK at this point, but we took it easy the rest of the day.  The campsite at Nankoweap Creek is really quite lovely.  It's a cozy little spot on the south side of the creek, just a little east of where the trail meets the creek.  There's ample room for several tents, shade from a stand of cottonwood trees newly decked out in the bright fresh green growth of spring, and the creek not twenty feet away.  We set up camp, pumped some water from the creek, had lunch, and then just puttered around and enjoyed a quiet lazy afternoon.  There didn't seem to be any residual symptoms from the blow to Herman's head, which was reassuring.

Day 3

The plan was to day-hike up Nankoweap Creek and try and get however close to Kolb Arch as time permitted.  The day started out somewhat overcast.  We took a leisurely pace and didn't get on the trail until about 8-ish.  The hike up was delightful: except for a couple of brushy patches the terrain was pretty open and made for very pleasant hiking.  In the end we only got far enough upstream to see Kolb Arch from a distance before we decided to turn back.  But we plan to be back.

Day 4

Another day-hike day, this time downstream down Nankoweap Canyon to the Colorado river.

The hike downstream is just as delightful as upstream, but feels very different.  The canyon narrows and tall cliffs tower on either side.  Huge house-sized boulders lie strewn about as though casually tossed there by giants.  The creek itself meanders through all this, minding its own business, almost lost among all this drama.  It's gorgeous!

Close below our campsite, in the damp sand by the creek, we came upon the tracks of a large cat.  They seemed large for bobcat—we figured mountain lion.  They were quite fresh, no more than a few hours old, and they followed the stream down and then back just as we did, so as we hiked down we'd see the tracks appear, then disappear, then appear again a little further on.  There were times when I found myself wondering whether we were being watched.

The cliffs to either side fell away and Nankoweap Canyon opened up to a wide plain as we approached the confluence with the Colorado.  Nankoweap Creek suddenly looked puny compared to the broad river winding its way lazily in front of us.  We took a fork of the trail that climbed steeply up the cliffs to the right, heading toward the Nankoweap Granaries.

As we worked our way up the narrow trail, the perspective on the landscape changed and we found ourselves looking down the Colorado as it wound its way between the vertical red cliffs on either side.  To say that the view was mind-bogglingly stunning is a huge understatement.

The trail to the granaries is steep and narrow and loose-rocky, and also very rewarding: first for the views, then for the granaries themselves: now just walled-in "rooms", but amazing when you pause to think of the people who made them, in this precarious place, some nine hundred years ago.  (Also, it's in shade in the middle of the day, which is a huge plus when the sun is hot overhead.)

Nankoweap granaries

Hanging out near the granaries

Tom and Herman (can you spot them?)

The confluence of Nankoweap Creek and the Colorado

We wandered around near the granaries for a while, then came back down and wandered around the river for a little bit.  The scenery was gorgeous and the temperature perfect, and I could have stayed there for a long time.  

We were almost back at our campsite when we ran into a lone hiker hurrying downstream.  He turned out to be a Dutch photographer trying to photograph the Nankoweap granaries at sunset.  The man was hiking alone, hadn't been here before (he was going off a GPS track someone had given him), and had managed to lose the trail several times already on the way down.  He had underestimated the hike, he said, and at times had feared for his life.  He asked if he could camp near us that evening and hike out with us the next day.  His fear was sobering: until then, even though Nankoweap had been a challenging trail, I had never thought of it in terms of life and death.

Approaching sunset

Day 5

We broke camp early and began the hike out.  The Dutch photographer hiked with us, reassured by the company even though we were moving slower than he was accustomed to.  Eventually, once we were far enough up and the trail seemed pretty obvious, he said goodbye and hurried on ahead.  He had a flight to catch and needed to be out.  We took our time going up the trail.  The hike was hard but uneventful: the views were just as gorgeous as on the way down, the trail just as breathtaking (maybe a bit more so because of the extra water we were carrying for the dry camp above Tilted Mesa and the next day's hike).

We reached our campsite mid-afternoon.  The sun was strong and hot in a cloudless sky, so—as on the way down—we took shelter in the shade of the junipers and dipped into our remaining drambuie.

The afternoon wound down quickly, the cliffs and canyons below us changing color and texture almost as we watched.  Dinner was early: so-so rehydrated food, but what views!

One of the joys of camping in the Grand canyon is the brilliant show of stars after dark.  We had timed this hike for around a new moon, which made the show all the more vivid.  I slept without a tent this last night, and so had a skyful of stars as my ceiling.  And every time I woke up at night, I'd open my eyes and see this brilliant field of stars.  Eventually the sky began to pale to the east—at first almost imperceptibly, then little by little a bit brighter—and the stars slipped away and vanished one by one.

Day 6

The last day of the hike.  We had about eight miles to the trailhead, but most of the steep stuff was behind us so it wouldn't be too bad.

We were on the trail a little after sunrise.  The red sandstone cliffs of the Supai were spectacular in the golden light of the early morning.  We took our time, with plenty of scenery breaks and a nice long lunch break at Marion Point, and finally climbed over the Canyon rim in the early afternoon.

Supai cliffs in the early morning light

Saddle Mountain

I've always found the tail end of the hike out of Nankoweap—the walk from the rim back to the trailhead—to be mentally challenging.  You've just done a long hard hike and are ready to be done with it—and climbing out from below the rim feels like that ought to be it!—except there are still three more miles to go.  And while most of that is an easy downhill, right towards the end there are a couple of small steep hills that are taxing simply because you're mentally done climbing steep hills.  Of course, you do it, because there's no other choice, but it's an effort just the same.  Then, before you know it, there's the sign at the trailhead and the hike is done.

I'm looking forward to my next hike down Nankoweap already.

Cedar Mesa/Grand Gulch/Butler Wash (Utah): Nov. 2016

Early in Nov. 2016, Tom and I spent six days backpacking and hiking in SE Utah, in and around Grand Gulch and Butler Wash, near Cedar Mesa.  We had visited the area the previous year, on the way back to Arizona from our Canadian Rockies hike, found a gorgeous landscape with an amazing richness of Ancestral Puebloan ruins, and promised to come back to explore more deeply.  This was that trip.

I met Tom in Flagstaff on the morning of Nov. 5. The weather forecast was for clear, sunny, and mild conditions all week, and we'd timed it to escape the robocalls and election hysteria that would crescendo the following week.  We were in a good mood as we headed north-east through the Navajo reservation.  But the towering banks of gray clouds stacked over the horizon seemed only to thicken and darken ominously as we wiggled through Moki Dugway and approached Cedar Mesa.

(A small digression on transportation logistics.  We had come up in one vehicle, and the entrance on our planned route was different from our exit point, which meant an 8-to-10 mile walk along a road to get from one to the other.  We chose to park at the exit point at Bullet Canyon trailhead, then walk to the entry point at Kane Gulch.)

I. Backpacking

It had begun to drizzle by the time we pulled up at the Bullet Canyon trailhead, which meant that our initial walk to Kane Gulch would be a little damper than planned.  Tom, ever the optimist, pointed out that the weather forecast was for the rest of the week to be clear and beautiful; my inner pessimist was sure that the raindrops as we began walking were a bad omen.  But things soon began looking up: a passing motorist stopped and gave us a ride to Kane Gulch, and, as we began hiking, the drizzle gradually lessened and eventually stopped.  We hiked in about a mile and set up camp under an overhang.

From Kane Gulch, the trail to the junction with Grand Gulch dropped a mellow 500-ish feet over a distance of about 3½ miles of gorgeous Utah slickrock landscape.  It ran mostly along the bottom of the gulch, soft and sandy and pleasant to walk on; very often it was covered in leaf litter, from the cottonwoods growing alongside, that hushed our footsteps and made for a quiet and contemplative hike.  The air was nice and cool, the sun pleasantly warm.  The hike was delightful.

There was just one thing that seemed just slightly odd at the time—although more in retrospect now than it was at the time.  There wasn't much in the way of flowing water along the bottom of the gulch. While there were many good-sized pools of standing water, these were often inky black and full of decaying leaf litter (if this had been a movie, this would've been a good time cue ominous music).  But we knew about several "reliable" springs along our route, so we just wrinkled our noses and moved on.

We reached the junction of Kane Gulch and Grand Gulch mid-morning and went looking for Junction Ruin, which was less than a quarter mile from the junction.  We saw some ruins above us as we walked along the trail, but didn't realize that they were what we were looking for, and hiked past them for nearly a mile before heading back.  The ruins themselves (once we realized, pretty much accidentally, where they were) were very impressive.  There were three distinct levels of structures, with many rooms at each level (dozens, according to the description in the papers BLM kept at the site in an ammo box), the topmost level high above us and reachable only by a precarious log ladder.  Several of the structures had been somewhat restored, but not overly obtrusively, and gave a good sense of what the place may have looked like originally.

Junction Ruin

Later, hiking downstream to Todie Canyon, we got our first surprise: Todie Spring, the first of three "reliable" springs along the route, was nowhere to be found!  The best we were able to do, after searching around for a bit, were a couple of pools of foul-smelling stagnant water full of rotting leaves: not very appetizing, but better than no water.  We used Tom's syringe to suck water out of the pool, to avoid disturbing the muck at the bottom, and this slowed down the whole process.  More than the delay, though, what was sobering were the potential implications of a "reliable" spring going dry.

Shortly afterwards, to our happy surprise, we came upon a small pool of water that was far enough from the trees to not have leaves rotting in it.  We dumped the smelly water we'd pumped just a little while ago and filled up on the clean water from this pool.  Once again, syringe-to-bucket to avoid stirring up muck, then pump the water out of the bucket: quite a bit slower than just pumping water out of a stream or river.  I think water purification at Todie Canyon set us back a couple of hours altogether!

Other than the missing spring, the hike continued to delight.  The trail meandered downstream gently along Grand Gulch, mostly along the soft sand of the creek-bed but stepping onto the bank here and there to avoid a muddy stretch or brushy spot (the sand was kind to the feet most of the time, but there were a few longish stretches of deep soft sand that we were happy to get out of).  We dropped our packs at a nice flat sandy spot beside a huge gnarly old cottonwood tree on the creek bank, half a mile above Split Level Ruin, and headed down to admire the ruins while we still had some light; Tom was so excited he was almost buzzing.  We returned to camp as the light began to fail.  The temperature began to drop quickly after sundown, and we were both tired, so we didn't stay up for long after dinner.

We made a beeline for Split Level Ruins after breaking camp the next morning.  These were a cluster of structures under an overhang on a small hillside a few dozen feet above the level of the trail, spanning, as the name suggests, two levels.  There were several smaller storage structures off to a side nearby; the midden—essentially the prehistoric settlement's garbage dump, now considered invaluable for archaeological research—lay cordoned off under the slope below the buildings.  The entire collection of ruins, lit up by the morning sunlight, was even more impressive than it had seemed in the fading light of the previous evening.  Especially fascinating to me was the debris field of ancient corn cobs and pieces of broken pottery lying around below the midden.  I think we must have spent well over an hour wandering around examining the ruins.

Split Level Ruin

A little way down the hike we came to Sheiks Canyon, which held the Green Mask and Yellow House Ruins and also the second of our three reliable springs. For reasons unimportant for this story, Tom and I wandered off on our explorations separately, leading to something like a game of Marco Polo up and down the canyon.  Eventually we ran into each other, went up to see the ruins, and noticed the panel upon panel of dazzling pictographs—including the famous Green Mask pictograph—decorating the limestone wall above our heads.

Sheiks Canyon

Happy campers: At Grand Gulch-Bullet Canyon junction

We didn't take on any water at Sheiks Spring, despite the good flow of clean water, because the next reliable water source, a spring at the junction with Bullet Canyon, was less than two miles downstream.  But once again, when we got there the spring was nowhere to be found.  We had enough water to tide us through to the next morning, but the bigger picture was disturbing: two of the three springs considered reliable had been dry, which didn't bode well for the smaller (and presumably less reliable) springs we'd have further downstream.  There was supposed to be another good spring a couple of miles up Bullet Canyon not far from Jailhouse Ruin (which we had visited the previous year), but it was late in the day and we had enough water for the evening, so we decided to go look for it the next day.

Our optimism was misplaced.  We did find water, but—like most of the pools we had seen on the hike—it was stagnant and smelly, choked with rotting leaves: enough that we wanted to see if we could find anything better.  But first we checked out Perfect Kiva, which we had missed by just a tiny bit the last time we were here.

Perfect Kiva, and the structures near it, were impressive, but had quite obviously been restored (for example, the rungs on the ladder into Perfect Kiva were bolted on).  A highlight for me was climbing down into Perfect Kiva, which gave a sense of what it must have been like originally; the obvious restoration detracted slightly from the experience, but only very slightly.

Perfect Kiva

On our way up to Perfect Kiva, Tom spotted a dark streak across some rocks from us.  When we went to check it out afterwards we found several puddles of clean water that must have added up to two or three gallons of water.  Elated, we got down to the now-familiar syringe ritual to pull water from the puddles without disturbing the mud at the bottom.  We had purified about three quarts each when, within a few minutes of each other, our purification devices failed—Tom's steripen stopped with an error message, and the piston rod inside my pump broke, rendering it unusable.  Oops.

This, of course, changed the situation completely: suddenly, we had no way to purify water even if we could find it.  (We did have some chlorine tablets as emergency backup, but not enough for two people for the remaining three days of our trip.)  So, with great regret, we bailed out of the backpack, hiking back up Bullet Canyon to where Tom's truck was parked.

Bullet Canyon

In summary, we'd had three days of backpacking: a little ways into Kane Gulch (day 0, night 1); down Kane Gulch to Grand Gulch above Split Level Ruin (day 1, night 2); down Grand Gulch to the junction with Bullet Canyon (day 2, night 3); and out Bullet Canyon (day 3).  Not too bad, but a lot less than what we'd planned.

II. Not backpacking

Once we got over the independent and near-simultaneous failures of two different water purification systems, our suddenly-revised plan was to pick up water from the nearest town, then explore what we could over the three days we had left via day-hikes.  We spent one day hiking down Government Canyon to Big Man Panel, then basically worked our way south down Butler Wash visiting various different points of interest: Fish Mouth Cave, Procession Panel, and finally all the way down to the San Juan river.

The drive down the dirt road paralleling Butler Wash was ... interesting.  The road was not in very good shape, and if it hadn't been for Tom's high-clearance truck, plus a lot of very careful driving, we would never have gotten through.  Once we got to the trailhead, though the hiking was delightful: the weather was calm and cool and wonderful, the terrain was mellow, and the lightness of the packs on our backs surprisingly (given our disappointment at having to abort the backpack) pleasant.

We saw quite a few ruins on these hikes, but mostly we saw art: pictographs and petroglyphs.  There were several that were jaw-droppingly stunning.  I don't think I can say anything that would do them anything close to justice, so I'll just put up some pictures and note that these were created many many many hundreds of years ago by people who had only relatively primitive tools at their disposal.

Big Man Panel

Pollys Canyon

Fish Mouth Cave

Monarch Cave Ruin

Procession Panel

View from the top of Comb Ridge

Butler Wash: Petroglyphs near the San Juan River

More pictures are available here.

III. Looking back

What made this trip memorable was, of course, the abundance of ancient ruins.  That was what we'd gone up for to begin with, but even then the reality far exceeded my expectations.  It was amazing what the ancient Indians had been able to accomplish given the primitive tools they had.  Of all the things we saw, the ones that spoke to me the most strongly and directly were the hand-prints left behind on the rock walls by these anonymous artists: a little personal greeting, as it were, from a long time ago.  I found myself wondering: Would (could) anything I create last as long?

It was disappointing, of course, that we'd had to end our backpack early.  On the other hand, given the circumstances, things had worked out remarkably well in that we were able to hike out without any issues and continue our explorations via day hikes.  More sobering was the fact that two of the three "reliable" springs we had been counting on were dry.  I couldn't help but consider the implications for the animals that relied on those springs.

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Postscript

A few weeks after this hike, I happened to pick up the book House of Rain, by Craig Childs, at a used book store in Austin, TX.  This book talks about the prehistory of the Southwest, intermingled with the author's own experiences in exploring that prehistory, in gloriously lyrical and evocative language.  I wish I'd read this book before our hike.