Category: Thru-Hiker

The Nankoweap: Don’t Look Down – Part 1 of 3

I’m glad I didn’t listen.

If I had listened, or paid attention to the YouTube videos of the Nankoweap Trail, I might have missed out on a once in a lifetime hike. [I mean that figuratively and literally — I’m not going back.] But I’m glad I hiked the Nankoweap last month [Oct. 16-23].  It was beautiful beyond words. Challenging, too, a high risk, high reward adventure.

The Nankoweap Trail is in the Grand Canyon National Park, in what’s called “back country,” and when I was invited to go I went to the Internet to see what the National Park Service had to say about it.

The description wasn’t too worrisome.

“This is a mostly waterless trail, with significant exposure in places,” the park service said. “This trail is not recommended for people with a fear of heights.”

I’m afraid of heights but it wasn’t too worrisome because this wasn’t my first rodeo. I was a Grand Canyon backpacking veteran, or so I thought. In 2012 I hiked rim to rim, down the North Kaibab Trail to the Colorado River and back up Bright Angel Trail to the South Rim. I thought I knew what narrow looked like.

I was greatly mistaken.

This is a wide spot in the tail where I sat down to rest, leaned over, and took this photo.
This is a wide spot in the Nankoweap Trail. When I sat down to rest I leaned over and took this photo.

“Significant exposure,” it turned out, meant that part of the trail, a mile or more, heck, several miles by my reckoning, is 12 inches wide or less. Some of it is boot wide and tilted toward steep slopes that end in cliffs. Sometimes the cliff is right there beside the trail. If you fall you could get hurt, bad. You could get killed.

In a word, the Nankoweap Trail was hairy beyond anything I had ever seen, and I’ve hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine.

I’m not the only one saying that about the Nankoweap, either.

“This trail is not one to be taken lightly,” an outdoor photographer posted. “The Park Service lists it being the ‘MOST difficult of the named trails in Grand Canyon’ and after hiking it once I would have to say that I must agree with that classification. The Nankoweap in many places is simply trouble waiting to happen…”

Now, let me pause right here.

A lot of it look like this, or worse.
A lot of the Nankoweap Trail looked like this, or worse.

A lot of you, backpackers especially, think I am exaggerating. I understand — I know why.  When I hiked the A.T. in 2015 I ran into right many folks, bless every one of them, who overstated the difficulties of the trail they had just hiked, and that I was about to hike. I might even have done that myself a time or two.

But there is no exaggerating the difficulties you will encounter on the Nankoweap. The National Park Service recommends that you allow two days to hike eight miles, from the trail head at the edge of the Grand Canyon National Park to Nankoweap Creek. Two days? That’s a clue, friend. On almost all of the A.T. I can hike eight miles before lunch, backwards. Well, OK, not backwards, but you get my point.

On the rim to rim hike in the canyon I did five years ago I was on what’s called a “corridor trail” and what I now call a “tourist trail.”

Phantom Ranch in the Fall.
Phantom Ranch in the Fall.

There were scores of other hikers out there with us. We were in the canyon three days and two nights and we stayed at campgrounds with picnic tables and a bathroom. There were rest areas with water. We ate supper at a restaurant at the bottom, near the Colorado River, called Phantom Ranch. There was a water fountain on a side trail in the middle of nowhere.

I’m not saying I didn’t enjoyed that hike. I did, a lot, and the friends I hiked with too. But in no way did it prepare me for the Nankoweap.

* * *

You may be wondering, so? Didn’t anyone slip and fall on the back country hike?

Yes.

And I’ll get to that.

* * *

Jim McDonald, L, Pat Stith
Jim McDonald, L, Pat Stith

I was invited to hike the Nankoweap by a new friend, Jim McDonald. Jim emailed me last April about a review I had written about the movie, “A Walk In The Woods,” a comedy about the Appalachian Trail. [I didn’t like it.] I wrote back and we began corresponding. Jim told me he was a backpacker too, mostly in the Grand Canyon, and in June he invited me to hike the Nankoweap Trail.

For years I had wanted to go on a back country hike in the Grand Canyon, but I wanted to go with someone who knew exactly what they were doing. And when Jim told me the hike organizer’s trail name was “Canyon John” I told him to count me in. You don’t want to go hiking in the back country with someone who’s called “Lost Again;” you want to go with “Canyon John.”

Canyon John Lavene
Canyon John Laneve: This was his 29th hike in the Grand Canyon.

This would be Canyon John’s 29th hike in the Grand Canyon –a total of more than 100 nights– and he tried to warn me about the Nankoweap, a trail he had been unable to hike the first time he tried, in 2007.

When Jim told Canyon John, whose real name is John Laneve, that I had accepted an invitation to join them, John responded:

“Jim – you can forward this to PAT. As he may want to view these to see the most dangerous part of this trail.”

Go to YouTube, he said in his email, type in “Chris Eacker” and take a look at his Nankoweap videos.

[You might want to look at them yourself, paying closest attention to #4 [0:35]; #5 [0:19]; #9 [0:13], #10 [0:27], #11 [1:11] and #14 [0:42]]

Jim is the main reason I ignored those warnings. He forwarded Canyon John’s message to me along with one of his own:

“All this is very helpful, but the only way to truly understand this is to do it. It is not nearly as intimidating in person as it is in these videos.”

I wanted to believe him, so I did.

Canyon John told me after the hike, “I wasn’t trying to scare you. I just wanted you to know what you were getting yourself into.”

Continued tomorrow.

The Crazy Hiker – Part 2

The woman who showed up at our Appalachian Trail shelter just before sundown was dead serious about leaving right away and hiking 10.6 miles, in the dark, back to Clingmans Dome.

She and her family –husband, father, and three young children– had unwittingly hiked the wrong way, south from Clingmans Dome when they meant to go north.

They were day hikers so they weren’t carrying tents or sleeping bags. Except for water bottles, which we had refilled, they weren’t carrying anything, including flashlights.

Looks like time at Derrick Knob Shelter.
Looks like nap time at Derrick Knob Shelter.

While her husband and her father stood there with their mouths shut, she decided the family would retrace its steps and walk back to Clingman’s Dome.  Think about that for a second: three tired, out-of-shape, adults [including a grandfather], attempting a 10-mile hike on the Appalachian Trial at night without flashlights, with three tired children in tow.

She couldn’t be serious. But she was.

When my three friends [Lynn Muchmore, Mark Ogden and Tony Goldman] and I realized that she had made up her mind we gave her two headlamps and a lot of trail mix.   But we continued to urge her to leave the kids at the shelter, a girl about 12 and two slightly younger boys.  Let them walk out tomorrow, when it was light. She finally agreed. Her husband would stay with children, she said, and she and her Dad would hike back to Clingman’s Dome.

When she said she would leave her husband with the children, he went berserk, and that’s the right word, berserk.  He took off running up the trail, north toward Clingman’s Dome, yelling, “No, I’m going! I’m going!” I had never seen a man act like that. She should have fired him on the spot.

But his bizzarre reaction didn’t seem to upset her. She just told her father to stay with the children and then she left to catch up with her husband.

That night a good time was had by all, all of us, at least. We built a fire. The kids played until dark, ate a good supper, and slept warm in borrowed sleeping bags. After breakfast, the old man, he was in his 60’s, and the children started walking north. My friends and I continued our hike, south toward Fontana Dam.

We didn’t hike far that day, just 9.2 miles, and that night a fellow caught up with us who knew the rest of the story.  He had sheltered the night before at Silers Bald, 5.8 miles north of Derrick Knob Shelter, where we had met the lost family.

About midnight, he said, the woman and her husband stumbled into Silers Bald Shelter almost hysterical. They had been terrified by noises in the woods, hidden from their their small beams of light. Bears? Boars?  Or just their imagination?

Backpackers at Silers Bald Shelter fed them and put them up for the night and, after breakfast the next morning, the woman and her husband left.

My question for you is this: Did they hike south, to make sure their children were OK, or north, the shortest route back to Clingmans Dome.

You know the answer, don’t you.

Coming Monday: The “Good Guy” Debt Collector