Hiking - Part 8

Grand Canyon

Standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon seems to inspire people to get naked for a photo, just like climbing to the top of a mountain does.  After all, it's one of the natural wonders of the world, worth a special photo.  How to make it more special?  You can drop trou, like here ...

Or get naked as a jaybird, like here.

Just don't get too close to the rim if you're afraid of heights.  It's a long way down.  The canyon is a mile deep.

But it's only by hiking down below the rim that the true nature of the canyon reveals itself.  This is Samuel Parrott, a visitor from Australia.  You can see how the Colorado River got its name.  Colorado means "colored" or "red colored" in Spanish.  (These days, it's not always red.  It depends on how much water is being released from the Glen Canyon Dam upstream.)

Down in the heart of the canyon there are some enticing side canyons and waterfalls.

This is Mike Foote and Rob Krar, two extreme runners, swimming naked across the river on Dec. 31, 2020 (not recommended – the river is very powerful).  They were doing a rim-to-rim-to-rim run, i.e. starting on the South Rim, running down to the river and up to the North Rim, then running back down and back up to the South Rim.  They accomplished this in 11 hours, 32 minutes, the fastest known time, but these guys are crazy.

For normal people, hiking to the bottom and back takes two days.  I once hiked down to the Tonto Platform, 2/3 of the way down, and back, when I was young and in good shape.  It took 4 hours going down and 8 hours going back up.

You can also visit the canyon by going on a river rafting tour, though that involves going through some extreme rapids, so it's not for the faint-hearted.  Here, some river rafters, taking a break at the bottom of the canyon, are meeting that elusive creature, the flaming land shark (don't ask).

But if you just want to view the canyon from the rim, that's OK too.  Maybe you'll get a photo that we can all admire for its scenic beauty.

I'll finish with a quote from The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher, a book that I highly recommend.  It's the story of his solo hike along the length of the Grand Canyon (not across the width) in 1963.  He didn't hike along the river – that's impossible: the sheer canyon walls drop straight into the river in many places – but on a series of ledges and terraces high above it, through remote areas with no trails.  The hike took two months.  After a little while, because of the heat, he decided to remove all his clothes except his boots, socks, and hat, and for the rest of the hike he was naked.  He wrote:

"Now, nakedness is a delightful condition.  And it keeps you very pleasantly cool–especially, I suppose, if you happen to be a man.  But as I walked on eastward that afternoon ... I found I had gained more than coolness.  I felt a quite unexpected sense of freedom from restraint.  And after a while I found that I had moved on to a new kind of simplicity.  A simplicity that had a fitting, Adam-like, in-the-beginning earliness about it."