1998 Grand Canyon / California Trip, part 3

Sunday, August 30, 1998--Going to the North Rim
Jim Martin and Cathy Schuyler picked me up the next morning with a van full of people that I did not know, but got to know quickly. There was Mary Murphy, her daughter Irene, (who did the entire 5-day backpack with a broken arm resulting from a horse-related incident...impressive), Ralph and Maria Bustamente, Gail LeClere—a nurse from Tuscon who only needs about 4 hrs sleep a night, Sharon Boukisch, and Joyce Lytle, a first-time backpacker. So that’s 7 women and only 3 guys. I was a little worried initially that most of the conversation might be about shoes or Oprah. Fortunately, Jim, Ralph, and I were intelligent enough to keep our mouths shut on the 8-hour drive to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, particularly during the male-bashing portions of the conversation. One of the girls assigned me a nickname “stressed Eric” after a character in some cartoon-network TV show I’d never seen, so I didn’t get the joke. Funny, though, I do tend to stress about things more than I should – hmm, maybe she was simply a good judge of character. There were the usual “are we there yet’s,” and “I gotta go to the bathroom’s” and “Jim, Ralph’s on MY side again” along the way, but we managed to make it without incident.

Although the Canyon is only like 10-12 miles across in a straight line, it takes about 8 hours to drive from Phoenix to the North Rim versus only 4 hours to the South Rim. Along the way to the North Rim, we stopped at this cool bridge over the Colorado River and snapped our first photos of the trip. As we got closer to the North Rim at 8000+ ft elevation, we began leaving the desert behind and going uphill through pine trees, meadows, and seeing more wildlife. I think someone in our crew with bad glasses thought they saw a mule deer – I’m pretty sure it was a standard cow. Ah, yes, the exotic wildlife of the Grand Canyon.

When we arrived, we set up tents at the main North Rim campground, then headed for dinner at the North Rim Lodge restaurant. Some people ate light. I, of course, had steak and wine. I’m on vacation. Then again, come to think of it, I never eat light.

Gail had never seen the Grand Canyon before, so Mary—who had seen the Canyon before—made Gail close her eyes while she guided her out to a good lookout point at the North Rim Lodge balcony. Then when Mary had Gail open her eyes, it was a cool reaction...she said “Oh my God” with this Yankee accent, and even cried a bit. This continued the pattern I had observed of people getting emotional when seeing the Canyon for the first time. I was pretty blown away as well. I had seen the Canyon’s South Rim before, but this view from the North Rim Lodge was new, different, and also very cool. The North Rim lodge has this cool stone balcony like you’d want in your dream house, but probably with a much better view than your dream house will likely have, unless you’re on Forbes’ billionaire’s list. The moment was only slightly spoiled by this redneck guy near us talking on a cell phone much too loudly to his mother (or wife, or both?), saying, “Hey man, guess where I’m at...” He kind of sounded like the character “Mater” from the movie “Cars”.

We had to wait over 2 hrs for a seat at the restaurant, which isn’t uncommon there (it’s the only restaurant for probably a hundred miles, so you’re kind of stuck), so we sat down at the lookout and had a few adult beverages. Cathy had a tequila sunrise, while I stuck to beer. Smoke from a controlled-burn in a nearby section of forest obscured some of the Canyon views that night, but not before we all had a chance to walk out on a lookout point and be more in awe. The redneck followed us down to the lookout point to call a different relative/spouse and say, “guess where I am!”

We camped that night in a campground near the North Rim, and got rained on throughout the early morning hours. Irene’s arm was really hurting the night before, so she had contemplated not doing the hike, but she felt better in the morning and said “it’s a go.” I had lifted my pack on a couple of occasions and was quite certain that I was going to die from its weight. I probably could have carried a fellow hiker on my back and it would have felt about the same!

When got out of our tents to prepare to head down Monday morning, it was nice clear, 50F morning – great weather to begin hiking. If only it would had stayed 50F!