Grand Day Loop

SW: Grand Canyon, USA

William Mackesy’s account of this walk

Drew, our driver-guide, drops us at the road barrier, and we walk the 10 minutes to the South Kaibab trailhead. As we reach the rim, a fierce wind whips up: rising dawn air.

The world below us is quiet and dim. The first light is just touching the upper ridges and buttes in a glorious incandescence.

Check watch:7.20am. We plunge. The early trail snakes down the hard pale limestone  cliffs below Yaki Point, coming out into the full glory of the canyon, and the golden early light, at the well-named Oo-ah Point. 

We are now on Cedar Ridge, with marvellous views each way and the deep red, shapely O’Neill Butte immediately below. This is a thrilling descent, at times teetering across the ridgetop in the buffeting gusts.

A steep descent, then a flat section crosses a saddle to swing below O’Neill Butte. Wonderful walking.

After a long, winding descent, we reach the famous viewpoint at Skeleton Point. A long view up the canyon in now hazier, flatter light. 

A steep series of switchbacks. We meet a pantomime cowboy at the head of  5-mule train bearing tourists, some uncomfortable some sheepish.

Then it is the bare ground and the lonely crapper at the Tip-off.

And here is the Tonto Trail, the great canyon-long mid-flanks traverse. It looks incredibly enticing as snakes away, less maintained and a whole lot emptier. We turn west for Indian Garden and the Bright Angel Trail, 4 miles away.

The next 2 hours are extraordinarily delightful walking, winding  steadily across the slopes, turning into the deep recess of the Pipe Creek canyon, enjoying the sudden appearance of bright golden autumnal leaves in its depths. Snack time. All around is the drama of the vast walls of the great canyon. It is so huge and the platform so flat, with the inner canyon often invisible, that you feel you are in a huge bowl with two escarpments marching beside it, rather than in a single canyon. The serried ranks of the north side's cliffs, ridges and buttes is somehow reminiscent of the wall of South Africa's great Drakensberg as seen from the rolling hills of Natal.

We eventually reach delightful Indian Garden, another canyon-bottom oasis complete with golden trees and running water.  It is usually overrun with people, but now, in mid November, it is peaceful.

We had agreed to head for the rim at this point, but to my delight Serena suggests (I hadn’t wanted to push it) that we turn back toward the famous view over the inner canyon at Plateau Point.

The 3 mile round trip is massively worth-it: at the end of the Tonto Platform, we sit on a rocky perch high above the Colorado river and eat our lunch. Far below, the green river roars through its dark, forbidding and narrow inner canyon, and heads off to the west as a receding sparkling sheet.  Gorgeous, and all within the thrilling surrounds of the wider Grand Canyon.

Back at Indian Garden, some water and mental strength gathering, then it is the tough 4.5 mile (3,200 ft) slog back to the South Rim.

The first miles or so is actually pretty easy, a steady climb  up the pretty, if mid-afternoon hot, Garden Creek Canyon. Dry grasses shine in the sun. Then the trail steepens and starts to climb above the canyon floor in wide loops rather than switchbacks as yet. A great advantage of the Bright Angel as an afternoon climb is that it is mostly in the shade, which helps reduce the impact of the long if gently graded climb.

 My view-admiration pauses become more frequent. The 3 mile (resthouse (hut) comes and goes. Then the 1.5 mile. It is steady enough walking for one to disappear into one's head rather than to be stuck with the struggle, but even so it goes on too long. 

The upper trail is amazingly engineered, an endless series of switchbacks working their way up gaps in impossible-looking cliffs. We drag our way up the huge, bright red lower cliffs, then the sheer pale upper ones. After a more sloping, broken section, we make great loops that get us brilliantly, by dint of wide loops and a couple of doors blasted into extending fins, up the white cliffs that are the final hard layer of the southern rim. 

It has been a bit over 3 hrs up,  1,000 ft an hour, my nirmal rate of climb: nit bad fir the end  rather than the start of a long day. (upside down walk)

We're back in the (very) populated world. It feels weird.