I was pulled from the WS100 in 1992 at the eighty-mile mark, at the Rucky Chucky River Crossing (24 hours into it) because I had just about lost all of my equilibrium. There is a time limit of 30 hours. Thirty hours and one second and you are a DNF (did not finish) at WS100. I needed a crew to support my thirty-hour effort, and called on my brother-in-law Brian, who was instrumental to me in finishing the Vermont 100, Framingham 24-hour track, and Rutland 24-hour track. (I had only one crewmember for my 200-mile solo run across Massachusetts from the New York State border to the ocean at Marshfield. She was so great I married her.) Anyway, Brian said he couldn’t make it, but he thought his friend Tommy would be interested. So my crew ended up consisting of Tom Donovan, who had spent months in Saudi Arabia but had never been west of the Mississippi River; Rich Busa, an experienced ultramarathoner who I met at the Essex Junction 50 miler in 1989; and Rich Boretti, a fellow Marshfield Road Runner who along with Tom Donovan is a veteran, seasoned marathoner. What a great crew it turned out to be.
But that is all just background to the main story. A friendship developed between the Donovans and the Bacons. As I write this, we are on our tenth vacation together with four more scheduled. Most of the trips have been in the southwest: Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, and this time Arizona.
It was the Utah trip that sparked this story, because it included a side trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. There we encountered a group of athletes who call themselves Rim To Rimmers. In two consecutive days they walk/run from the South Rim to the North Rim and back to the South Rim. It’s 21 tortuous miles each way. Serious nutcakes — distant relatives to ultra marathoners (who run races longer than the 26.2-mile marathon). After speaking with them for awhile, Tom was hooked. He tried for three years to get us reservations to hike down to the Grand Canyon bottom at Phantom Ranch for one sleep and then out the next day.
It’s a hard two days and a pretty serious hike. Six to eight hours down and eight to ten hours up. There are warnings not to try to go down and come up the same day. There are posters of a pretty 22 year-old who had run the Boston Marathon in April and tried to go to the bottom and back in the same day in July — and died on the trail. The posters are all around the canyon. They were put up by her parents to warn others that this should be taken as serious business. In large type they say, “Can you run the Boston Marathon?”
Accommodations at Phantom Ranch are cabins, dormitories (bunkhouses) and camping. People from all over the world try to obtain reservations through the Park Service. Tom tried and failed for three years. There is a waiting list, but you have to be at the transportation desk at the Bright Angel Lodge at 6:30 a.m. the same day you are to descend. Only if someone cancels can you hope to get in. Last year our friends Donna & Randy Adams lucked out while visiting the South Rim and scored dormitory bunk house beds. Former marathoners, they made the round trip and told me about it, and I caught the bug. I told Tom about their luck. He was happy for them but frustrated that we couldn’t get in.
So like I said, here we are back in the southwest, sleeping in cabins on the South Rim. Tom has put our names in for the Phantom Ranch. Tomorrow morning we have to be at the transportation desk, packed and dressed and ready to go at 6:30 a.m.
Sandy is helping me pack. It is just like getting ready for an Ultra, which I haven’t done in ten years. Dress in layers, pack as light as possible, but forget nothing. Running headlamp, socks, hat, and bandana. Suncreen, water, water and water. Am I hydrated? Am I ready? Am I in shape? Am I out of my mind? The first day outside of Phoenix, we leave an air-conditioned restaurant and walk out into the heat and say “Oh boy.” Never mind that we also have 7000' elevation, which saps your energy at least 20-30%.
Before our alarm can go off, an elk trumpets us awake. It is rutting season. The Navajo Park Ranger says, “Don’t go near them.” We get to the Bright Angel Lodge Ranger Transportation desk, which also handles the mule trips, and wait. At exactly 6:30 a.m. we hear, “Donovan!” Our name is called. The Park Ranger asks, “Cabin or bunkhouse?” Not only are we in, we scored a cabin! I thought Tom was going to vault the desk and hug the ranger.
As Sandy and Eileen are driving us to the trailhead, I start to fret. Half of my training has been pushing my new grandson in his carriage around my hilly neighborhood two mornings a week. It is 55 degrees at the Rim. We hug our wives goodbye, via con dios, and start down the rocky Kaibab Trail. Both Tom and I are wearing our blue 2006 Boston Athletic Association volunteer jackets. The Kaibab is steep, with a million switchbacks and 99% sun. There is not a cloud in the sky today. It is scary at first walking along the precipice. In an hour you have your sea legs and you almost lose your fear of tripping and going over the edge. You start to take in the beauty of the inner canyon. It is even quieter than the desert. When a vulture flies over your head it’s loud. I find myself singing “and the skies are not cloudy all day.”
A couple of hours into it, and I want a distraction in the form of a mule team. BANG — the canyon spirits oblige on the next switchback. At first you hear the clip-clop of the mules’ shoes on the rocks, and then you see ‘em. They are coming up from the Tonto Trail that bisects the Kaibab. So cool - real cowboys leading them. One at the head and one at the rear. Cowboy hats, cowboy shirts, spurs, bandanas, chaps. I ask the young lead wrangler if he has seen Gabby Hayes today. He says “Who?” Hoppy would be pissed off if he heard that the wrangler didn’t know who Gabby, his old sidekick, was.
When you encounter the mules on the trail, etiquette says you stop and hug the inside wall so they don’t bump you off the cliff. I read Death in the Grand Canyon and it said the mules have never lost a rider. No mule/hiker statistics available at this time. I take a picture of the lead cowboy and he draws his gun on me. Well . . . that’s what it looked like at first. Only it was his business card. “Can I e-mail him the photo?”
At least half the hikers coming and going are using ski poles or hiking sticks. Use one at WS100 and you are disqualified. The race director says it makes the 100 miles too easy. Tom of the water police reminds me to keep drinking. He probably figures that if I’m drinking I can’t be singing. The sun is heating us up and our quads and calves are taking a beating. “All day I face the barren waste, without a taste of water — cool, clear, water.”
Down and around Switchback #1076 we run into Jeremiah Johnson. Okay, not really, but there he is, a mountain man with no buckskins or feathers. But he is a mountain man. He is an older gent with bandy rooster legs and zero body fat, wearing a t-shirt that says his name is Maverick, the Rim To Rimmer. He says he has completed 78 rim to rims this year and plans to do two more before the snow flies. Why? To equal his age. Maverick is eighty years old. Then he reaches for his gun . . . okay, again it’s a business card, which has his name and the slogan “inspire to perspire.” We take photos with him. His business card has an email address on it, and he asks us to mail him photos. Only 1% of Grand Canyon visitors hike down into it. We are now 1%-ers. We bid Maverick Happy Trails and continue on down.
“Look,” Tom says, “There’s the Colorado.” The Spanish conquistadors, led by their Hopi guides, looked over the Rim and thought the Colorado was about six feet across. We can finally see our destination but it is still three hours away. You hear the river before you see it. It thunders. Now we see the foot bridges and the large J-rigs and smaller eight-person rafts of the river outfitters tied to the banks. Slightly downriver is a seemingly abandoned raft. Out of the sky comes a helicopter. It’s a rescue of some kind. There will be around 250 rescues this year It’s an expensive ride out of the canyon. You have to pay attention here.
We arrive at Phantom Ranch. There is no welcoming committee. There are two Indian ruins here. Powell didn’t mention them in his journal. It’s 95 degrees. One day this summer it hit 117 - a cook fried an egg on a metal table outside, using only the sun for fuel.
John Wesley Powell and his contingent of nine men were the first whites to travel the 500 miles through the canyon. He was a Civil War Union officer who lost his right arm at Shiloh. Shiloh in Hebrew means, “place of peace.” Twenty thousand men died at Shiloh. He names the creek at Phantom Ranch “Bright Angel.” I know why as I walk along it to reach our cabin. It sparkles like a million stars. It is bright and clear, and has fish, and flows into the brown muddy 44-degree Colorado River.
Many visitors to the Grand Canyon come to raft it. Some hike down Bright Angel Trail, catch their appointed raft and crew, and ride it downriver ten or twenty miles south towards Mexico. A canyon boatman (River Rat as they call themselves) invented the rubber sandals Tevas and that’s the truth. Here I am in Bright Angel Creek.
Years ago I brought my family on a five-day river trip here. We started in Moab, Utah, floated slowly down to the confluence of the Green to Spanish Bottom and into Cataract Canyon, and ended at Lee’s Ferry. John Lee was an adopted son of Brigham Young. He was prosperous and had nineteen wives. He was hung for his association with the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 100 people on a wagon trail headed for California.
The rapids on the Colorado are named and numbered. When rocks fall down they make the opening of the river smaller, creating bigger rapids — like putting your finger over the end of a garden hose. The river gets pretty narrow at Cataract Canyon, producing rapids #21, #22 and #23, named “Big Drop 1,” “Big Drop 2,” “Big Drop 3,” followed by #24, “Satan’s Gut.” Satan’s Gut sucked our whole raft under. We were just about out of air when it decided to let us go and we burst through to the surface. We were lucky. Sometimes the holes don’t let you go.
Colorado boatmen have their own lingo. Off the river there are mesas, rims, draws, gulches and flats. High white swells are haystacks. Smooth currents of water slipping into one another make holes. Fountains of water pouring skyward are called boils. Imagine lying on the floor of your two- story house looking up. The waves on the Colorado can be as high as your roof. Now imagine looking down from your attic to the first floor. And so the ride goes. On the ocean you know when the wave is coming. On a river you don’t. Powell said Cataract Canyon was the worst of the rapids on his 500-mile trip. And I in my infinite wisdom took my family on a vacation there.
I love western humor. On the expedition during a day of rest one of Powell’s men wrote in his journal “Today I did nothing and the other boys helped.” Two old geezers at the Flagstaff train station told Sandy, “If a rattlesnake is stretched out it’s okay to pet it.” We saw one on the trail. Well first I heard the rattle then Tom and I both saw it. It was curled up so we didn’t bother to pet it.
Steak dinner or beef stew was the menu at the ranch. The cook rings a big bell to announce that it is ready. We all sit in one big room. Male and female, young and old, we had all hiked in. The ranch foreman said “Give yourselves a hand for making it down.” And we did. Two choices of beer at dinner and one is my favorite, ice cold Mexican Tecate. A cold beer in the middle of paradise. How cool is that?
In the midst of this little oasis of trees and cactus are critters. Deer, coyote, cougars, rattlesnakes, Mexican spotted owls, spotted skunks, stellars jays, squirrels, bats. To my surprise, turkeys and ring-tailed cats, which are sort of a cross between a cat and a squirrel and a raccoon. We know what they look like all right - they tried to get into our cabin screen windows. After a ranger talk about the reintroduced condor we turn in. Here's a picture of our cabin.
5:00 a.m. brings a breakfast of peaches, orange juice, coffee, tea, eggs, the best bacon Tom has ever had, and water, water, water. We refill our bottles with cold spring water. It is still dark and eighty degrees at 5:30. We head to the trail across the Colorado with our headlamps beaming. 9.8 miles straight up. Sandy and Eileen are waiting at the top of Bright Angel Trail.
Notice: England has been abandoned and most of its people are here in the Grand Canyon. It seems there is a Circle Tour run out of Europe that covers San Francisco, Las Vegas, Yosemite, Bryce and Zion, and Monument Valley. We spoke to many people along the trail. One, a young man from Manchester, went on and on about Monument Valley and John Wayne. “Which country buys the most western memorabilia - England, France or Germany?” Wrong! The answer is Italy. It really is. I would say 70% of the hikers in this canyon are foreigners. Can you say anything in Japanese?
The climb out along Bright Angel Trail is three miles longer than the Kaibab, but much easier. There is lots of water, especially at the halfway point at a place called Indian Gardens. We are out of the canyon two hours earlier than what we told our esposas. When we finally meet up they are really glad to see us and listen to our stories. When we are through for the moment, they say, “You have to meet someone, follow us.”
They take us to the Kolb Photo Studio on the Rim and introduce is to Shirley. Who’s Shirley? Well, she works at the studio, and overheard Eileen and Sandy talking about their husbands, who were currently climbing up from Phantom Ranch. Well so was her husband . . . and guess what his name is! He’s the famous Maverick, the Rim to Rimmer. Shirley gives up big hugs and welcomes us to the 1% club. What an adventure it has been.
On the way down Route 180 towards Sedona, we see an Adopt a Highway sign which reads “This section of highway was adopted (paid to be cleaned) by none other than Shirley and Maverick.” If you don’t believe me, the next time you are at Grand Canyon, check it out. And when you meet Maverick on the trail, tell him Tom and Bob’s big adventure story inspired you to become a 1%-er.
The moral of this story is: Why bother to read fiction - truth is stranger.
by Bob Bacon
September/October 2006
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