Grand Canyon Misadventures

So on Friday afternoon I spoke with Sarah, a Columbia medical student who arrived at Zuni as I was leaving. 3 other Columbia students are at Shiprock (another IHS center nearby), and she informed me on Friday that they had a backcountry permit to camp Fri and Sat nights 5 miles from the rim inside the Grand Canyon, and were planning to hike down to the Colorado river and back to the campsite on Saturday. This was exactly the trip I had been wanting to do. Unfortunately by the time I got this message, it was too late to get to the Grand Canyon before dark, so we figured we would meet up with the group the following day to camp there Saturday night. I wanted to d the full hike to the river, whereas Sarah didn’t, so I went on Friday to camp on the rim and get an early start the next morning and Sarah was going to come up Saturday afternoon and meet everyone at the campsite (Eremita Mesa) on Saturday night.

Coming into the park as late as I did, I didn’t get a map or anything. I tried to contact the guys via their cellphone a few times, but it went straight to voicemail so I went to the Visitor’s Center first thing to get some information on the location of this campsite. I got there around 7:30am but it didn’t open until 8. I asked a shuttle driver about Eremita Mesa, and he had never heard of it but he did have the park guide in the shuttle that he gave me. I looked it over but didn’t see Eremita Mesa on any of the (skeleton) maps in it so I waited patiently outside the visitor center. At 10 till 8, a guy came out and started washing the windows. I figured he was going to open the doors at 8 when he was done. Finally at 2 minutes till I asked him if he was going to open them. (This wasn’t exactly Captain Eager-to-Help.) He pointed to the sign on the door that said 8AM, then showed me his watch, which said 7AM. Crap. Stupid Arizona doesn’t follow Daylight Savings Time, so right now they’re on Pacific time. I knew that, but since I’m now living in Arizona I thought I was on Arizona time. However apparently the Navajo Reservation does follow Daylight Savings, despite being 1/3 of the area of Arizona, so I’m actually on Mountain Time at work here despite being in Arizona. Blast. As I debated what to do a kind ranger came out to ask if he could help me with anything. He hadn’t heard of Eremita Mesa either (this was beginning to be a little suspicious.) I needed to go to the Backcountry office where they knew more, which also didn’t open until 8, and which was a shuttle ride away somewhere. Around this time Sarah called me to say that she had received a text message from the group with instructions to start at Hermit’s Rest trailhead and follow Hermit Trail to Eremita Mesa. The ranger said he wasn’t familiar with the Hermit’s Rest part of the park and that’s probably why he’d never heard of it. Fantastic. I got on the shuttle and set off, happy not to have to wait another hour.

An hour and a half later (the shuttle bus system is really painfully slow there) I arrived at the trailhead. There was a better map of this section of the park and some trail info on the trail marker. There was a Hermit Creek campground on it, but no Eremita Mesa, which seemed suspicious. However I figured that since we had the directions from the others, and they’d apparently found it, I would just follow the trail and at some point it would widen into a campground or there would be a sign. I tried to call Sarah, but had no cell phone signal. Also ominous here was the presence on the trailhead of a poster warning hikers to be careful in the Grand Canyon. The poster child for this was a medical student who had ran the Boston Marathon in 3hrs but who had died of dehydration while doing a day hike in the Grand Canyon. At least I had my tent and tons of water and food in my pack for the overnight, so I went with it.

I asked the first people I found if they had a good map. They did have a topographical map, and we didn’t see Eremita Mesa, but it didn’t have the campgrounds on it so it was hard to tell for sure. Finally a good ways down into the canyon I found some people with a good map, and Eremita Mesa was listed as one of the campsites. This was a big relief. However, on the map it was a big 3 square mile mesa with no particular established camping site, and it looked like it was off the Dripping Springs trail, which had branched off of the Hermit Trail near the top. Begrudgingly I turned around and started hiking back up out of the canyon with the 2 map guys (who had spent the previous 2 nights in the canyon.) Around 1pm I returned to the Dripping Springs trailhead and started following it out toward Eremita Mesa. At this point I had given up any hope of hiking down to the river, and was just hoping to find the camp and drop off my tent and heavy pack. At the end of the Dripping Springs trail however, rather than finding a wide open mesa with tents like I was hoping, I found myself on a ledge in the side of the canyon with cliff face above and below me, and the trail just ended. Now I was sure I was never going to locate Eremita Mesa or the group, and decided the best thing was to just hike back out of the canyon. I was worried about Sarah, since if she followed the directions she would end up down at Hidden Creek campground without a tent, but still had no cell phone service and wasn’t sure where on the trail she might be.

Amazingly, as she entered bright eyed and bushy tailed, Sarah found me on the trail just a quarter-mile or less from the rim, trudging dejectedly after the long, hot ascent in the brutal desert sun. I was really glad to see her. I convinced her that finding them was a lost cause and we decided to go back and camp on the rim again and just do a day hike on a different trail the next day. We consoled ourselves with cookies and a steak dinner, then camped under the stars which are really intensely bright there.

I was so focused on my misadventures, I forgot to mention how gorgeous the Grand Canyon is. I remember being taken aback by this last time I visited it, but I had forgotten just how stunning it is and was once again surprised. You always knew the Grand Canyon was a big canyon, but no one ever mentioned that it is a beautiful canyon too. It’s a series of stepped table-top mesas with intense reds, purples, and greens that, when looking across the vast expanse to the other side, blend together like an impressionist painting. (There was also a cool art exhibit at the canyon featuring different 1900s artists’ interpretations of the Grand Canyon that Sarah and I had seen the night before. Looking at the canyon certainly inspires one’s artistic side.) This made for a beautiful hike on the Bright Angel trail on Sunday. We didn’t push ourselves too hard, just enjoyed ourselves and left plenty of time to do the hard part which is coming back out of the canyon (it’s so easy going down that you could continue downward forever, but then you might get stuck down there, which is how people die). We got back to the rim pretty early in the afternoon and enjoyed an ice cream cone and the views a little more before getting in our cars to drive back, planning to get home in the early evening and be well-rested before work the next day.

I was really excited about going to Walmart (yes, I have never wanted a Walmart so badly. It’s sad, I know, but the alternative grocery here in Chinle is painful to shop at and you leave it feeling that you’ve wasted hours and yet still don’t have half of what you need.), so I found one in Winslow on I-40 and decided to take the only slightly longer I-40 route home so I could go to Walmart. I was making great time.

Just east of Flagstaff, an electronic highway sign warned of “high winds and blowing dust 30 miles ahead.” I plunged ahead, mentally preparing my extensive Walmart list. Winslow was the next big stop on I-40 after Flagstaff. 20 miles from Winslow, there was suddenly slowed traffic ahead on the interstate. Hmm, lots of people exiting here at Two Guns for some reason. I switched to the left lane to pass. Oh, there’s an emergency vehicle in the left lane. Must be an accident. I merged back into the right lane to wait my turn to pass the blocked lane. But then, we got waved off the highway and onto the exit. A large truck behind the police car was unloading and setting up flashing cones. I looked ahead to the detour we were being taken on…a full U-Turn across the overpass and right back onto I-40 westbound. But I didn’t want to go west, I wanted to go east! I needed Walmart damnit!

After trying to wait it out while reading a book parked on a dirt feeder road on the other side of the overpass rather than heading back west, the highway patrol came and told us we weren’t allowed to wait there. Of course I was almost out of gas, as I had been trying to push it to Winslow and make all of my stops at once. I had to go back to Flagstaff to get gas, and figured I might as well settle in for the wait. How long could it last? Fortunately Sarah and I found one another again and found a nice brewery where we just kept ordering another course every time we checked the highway report and found out I-40 was still closed. Finally around 10pm we decided that we might have to spend the night in Flagstaff. We found a cheap hostel but decided it was worth one more drive out of town to see if it had by chance opened. Fortunately we saw a steady line of heavy semi-truck traffic heading from the other direction, and sure enough the interstate had just reopened. Thank God. And I even made it to Winslow 15 minutes before Walmart closed. Thus ended the Grand Canyon saga and nearly all that could have gone wrong, and did.

Chinle First Impressions

*There are 2 backlogged posts that are forthcoming, but for now I wanted to say a few quick things about my new home in Chinle, AZ, on the Navajo Nation, where I'll be spending the next month doing a general surgery rotation.

I arrived in Chinle late Sunday night, so I didn’t see much until Monday morning when I left home to go to work. Here in the big town of Chinle (by big I mean there is 1 real stoplight--only stop signs in Zuni, 3 fast food restaurants, a semi-sizeable grocery store, schools, and even a youth corrections facility—right by my house!) I actually live about a 10 minute drive from the hospital, although things are pretty spread out so that’s somewhat of an overestimate of the town’s size. The hospital itself however is about 5 times bigger than Zuni's.

This morning I opened my front door to go to work and got a big surprise: there was an unsaddled horse about 2 feet from me! It was just hanging out in my front yard with its buddy, trying to eat my mud (yah I don't really have any grass). It seemed a little ornery about my sudden disruption. On 2 subsequent drives through town in daylight I now realize that horses are just wandering around grazing all over the place.

Surprise # 2: there was ice frozen to my windshield from freezing rain overnight. I couldn’t find my ice scraper—I’m pretty sure I remember seeing it in the car while I was packing for this trip and saying “ice scraper, bah, I don’t need that for the desert in April!” and throwing it out into my parents’ garage. (Since I’ve been here it has now snowed on me 4 times.)

Just a brief description of my work environment, i.e. my supervisor: a general surgeon who started the day by telling me how he just returned from a weekend rally of some ultra-conservative group with pro-life and anti-immigration speeches by Rick Perry and Sarah Palin, who makes crude and feminist jokes all day long, who is an ex(within the last 5 years)-priest, and who is currently active in the Army and about to be deployed. I don’t know about medicine-wise, but the month promises to be entertaining.

National Park Grand Tour

Amazing, beautiful, incredible, breathtaking…as you read you might notice that I’m lacking sufficient adjectives to describe the scenery around here. I’ve taken several weekend trips already (to Chaco Canyon, Pagosa Springs, Wolf Creek, Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, El Malpais—see my photos for those places), but now I had a whole week of vacation to drive long and far to arrive at the biggest and best: Bryce and Zion National Parks.

I started the trip in Albuquerque, where Andreas met me for the weekend. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Albuquerque is a really cool city. We really liked Nob Hill and the University district, where there were lots of coffee shops, restaurants, and tons of people out and about. Specifically we had chosen Albuquerque to attend the Gathering of the Nations Powwow. This is an annual powwow attended by thousands of people from all different American Indian tribes across the United States and Canada. It was being held in the UNM football stadium, if that gives you an idea of the scale of this thing. Dancers from the different tribes were wearing the most elaborate of their respective traditional dress. Most were brightly colored and fully decorated and adorned with beads, feathers, bells, and fringe. The men from one tribe had huge feather headdresses, feather shields on each arm, and two large feather rings across their shoulders and low back. When they danced, it created a fury of flying colors and bobbing feathers.



On Saturday we drove out to Acoma Pueblo, or “Sky City,” as their casino is named. This is a mud-stone pueblo village that sits on top of a mesa and doesn’t have running water or electricity. It claims itself as the oldest continuously-inhabited pueblo in the United States, and the Acoma tribal leadership continues to live there today. They have a visitor center and give guided tours.



My first stop after Andreas left me on Sunday night was Mesa Verde, Colorado, the national park that has the largest collection of Anasazi (or “ancestral puebloans” as they are now being called) cliff dwelling ruins. There I got to take a tour of Cliff Palace and Balcony House ruins, ancient communities nestled into shallow sandstone alcoves in the cliffs on the sides of the mesas. This is pretty close to Durango, and there are beautiful snow-capped mountain peaks not too far away as well. I seriously doubt that these people wore nothing but loin cloths, as they are usually depicted because I bet it gets really cold in the winter there. It wasn’t even close to loincloth weather in late April either.



Next I camped at Arches National Park in Moab, Utah. This is an area with a huge concentration of sandstone arches which form naturally as the sandstone erodes, and there are dozens there, each a little different in size in shape. The scenery was beautiful, and I took a nice hike through the “Devil’s Garden,” a place where tons of weird sandstone formations have formed very close together.



I had to drive through Capitol Reef National Park to get to Bryce, and I chose to take a scenic road there which turned into a dirt road and eventually connected me (at the top of a switchback ascent up a near-cliff) to the paved scenic Burr Trail in Staircase-Escalante National Monument. This drive was unbelievable. First you drive alongside Strike Valley, where it looks like the earth’s crust was literally just pushed up in a big line. Then on the Burr Trail you drive through a twisting red-rock canyon and then up into some white sandstone badlands.



In Staircase-Escalante park I decided to stop to explore some slot canyons that I had heard about. This was made more interesting by the fact that today the wind was blowing 60+ mph, and the canyons had loose sandy bottoms. Yes, it was basically a sandstorm. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much sand on me or in me. I’m pretty sure I inadvertently swallowed a bunch (maybe that cleans out the intestines?) and clumps of it kept coming out my eyes the whole next day (that can’t be good for the corneas). Fortunately I found a good shower that night to wash the pound of sand off of me. Staircase-Escalante is almost all backcountry and much less developed than the national parks, meaning that there were some trail directions that started from the “trailhead,” which per directions could be found at the end of a turnoff 26 miles down a dirt road. There was a sign at 26 miles on the dirt road indicating the trail, but after that despite there being multiple dirt roads traced through the desert, there were no further signs. From my map it appeared that the road curved left, and that it would be obvious because if you stayed straight and didn't make the curve you would be on a "jeep trail" instead of a road. I thought that I had found that point when I dropped the civic over a 2-foot drop-off in the road and nearly got stuck (this is the day I tried to test the high-clearance offroading abilities of the civic. I tried to kill it, but it fortunately survived the test.) Once I got back up the small cliff I had driven down, I curved left like the map indicated and found a bunch of cars parked and some tents pitched and figured that must be the trailhead. No one was around to ask, so I figured everyone was on the trail and I tried to follow the directions (“follow the rock cairns from the trailhead…”). However there were no rock cairns in sight. Since I was looking for a descent into a canyon (obviously), I did a little route-finding and found a way down, eventually finding some of the promised rock cairns that I was able to follow the rest of the way into the canyon. I couldn’t find Peekaboo, the first slot (which was supposed to have a difficult-to-spot entrance 12 feet off the ground), but I found another canyon that seemed a perfect match for Spooky's description (started in a wide sandy wash, narrowed to a slot, and ended with a big choke stone and another wide wash). It was super-cool to be in a slot canyon where you were squeezing between narrow rock curves and touching both sides to get through. Since it was still early, I decided to walk on toward Brimstone slot, which was supposed to be a bit further and longer than the other two. After a long and windy walk through really loose sand, I found Brimstone for another fun slot exploration. This one didn’t end, but you basically couldn’t go any further without spiderman climbing skills because the ground level became too narrow to pass. In there I found a teenage boy and his grandfather (first people I'd seen), who marveled at how fast I had been able to explore the 2 canyons so far (I didn't feel like I was moving that fast, but I was walking a lot faster than the grandfather who was an older gentleman and I passed them on my way back out). They told me they were camping at the trailhead and confirmed their tent was set up there. They also told me I couldn’t miss Peekaboo, so I headed back the way I came past Spooky and started looking very closely above my head for Peekaboo. However, I found nothing, and turned back to look for the grandfather/son again to try to get them to point it out to me. When I found them resting near the entrance to Spooky, they looked confused. I pulled out my photocopied trailmap which the visitor center had provided. Well apparently they were confused because I was coming back toward them from a part of the canyon that wasn’t actually on the trail, and I hadn’t explored Spooky after all because somehow I had started the canyon in the middle instead of at the end. That's why I was going so "fast!" My “Spooky” was just the narrow part of the main canyon which I was supposed to cross when walking between the real Spooky and Brimstone. That explained why I never got to some narrow part of the canyon with a difficult-to-negotiate choke stone when walking to Brimstone… So I went back through my fake “Spooky” to look for the real Spooky. I found it (it was much longer than the narrow part of the main canyon I had explored before), and required some minor climbing to get through some narrow spots. So cool. I then turned around, retraced my steps to the (real) main canyon, and walked further up looking again for Peekaboo. Still no luck. I followed a trail with tons of footprints which led to rock cairns that I followed up over a ridge and out of the canyon. I decided it was getting late and I should forget about Peekaboo and just go back to the car, assuming I was now on the proper trail back to the trailhead that I couldn’t find the first time. I kept following the cairns until they suddenly ended. Hmm. I thought I recognized some landmarks near where I had parked the car so I decided to just continue walking toward those (ok, that was kind of dumb). After about 45 minutes of wandering about, I realized that I had not found my car after all, started to get nervous that I might get lost out here alone, and had to retrace my steps back to the end of the rock cairns, figuring I should just go all the way back to the way I came in and exit the way I knew, even though it was apparently not the correct trail. On the way however I found more footprints and rock cairns following a streambed wash, and decided to give those a try since obviously lots of feet had trekked through there, which ostensibly would indicate a proper route (although I'm now learning that it also means that lots of people have thought the same as me and made the same wrong turns). Suddenly I found myself in another slot canyon. I went through this one with a little less gusto since I was now unsure where I was and annoyed at the crappy trail directions, but at the other end I found myself 12 feet up a canyon wall…somehow I had entered the backside of Peekaboo. I now came down into the (real) main canyon again and followed it to some seemingly more reliable rock cairns all the way up and out…to a trailhead with an actual sign and lots of cars...that weren’t mine. Hmm again. Fortunately that grandpa/son were up there camping out at this real trailhead, and kindly took me in their car to find my car. It turns out my car was up what was marked on the map (but not the road) as a “jeep trail.” Way to go little civic. Now the people who were camped up there were back to their tents, and had been wondering where the heck my car had come from since apparently they realized that they were camping in the backcountry away from the trailhead and didn't expect anyone else to be there. In summary, a near disaster, but still a fun introduction to slot canyons.

I was going to drive up to camp at Bryce National Park that night, but I met some people in a gas station in Escalante who told me they had been there and it was too cold to camp so they’d come back down to Escalante. On their advice, I spent the night in Escalante and drove up to Bryce first thing the next morning. Turns out this was good advice, because close to Bryce there was a lot of snow on the ground. The farms had their irrigation wheels running, and the wheels and surrounding fields were covered with icicles. Bryce has a dense population of red sandstone “hoodoos” or little rock towers. There are observation points where you can look out over huge fields of them. I put on my warmest clothes and went on the figure 8 hike down between the hoodoos. Snow tends to make everything seem peaceful and mystical anyway, but the snow on the red stone hoodoos made the hike absolutely magical.



Finally I went to Zion National Park to spend my last weekend. This park is absolutely breathtaking as well. It’s called “zion” and lots of the mountains in it have religious names (like Abraham, Jacob, the organ, and the great throne) because they were named by preachers passing through the area. Looking at the magnificent landscape with its sandstone mountains towering around the canyon, it’s easy to see how these religious men would have seen it as a gift from God.



On my second day here, I decided to sign up for a canyoneering trip. Canyoneering is an adventure sport that involves setting up ropes to rappel down mountains/cliffs that are too steep and/or long to climb down, usually down into canyons. Canyoneering is really, really fun, and maybe a little addicting. I definitely want to do it again. So, if anyone would be interested, it’s better done in a group so that people can spot one another, and I really want to find canyoning partners for some future canyon explorations.

On the long drive back to Chinle on Sunday I noticed that I had reentered the southern side of Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and couldn’t resist stopping to do one more quick hike. The toadstools took me to sandstone towers (like hoodoos) which are topped with balancing granite stones (hence “toadstools”). This happens because the sandstone erodes away faster than the granite layer on top of it. The return hike once again seemed a little less clear than the way out there. I was following footprints and a potential trail when I came across a foreign couple that didn’t speak very good English. “End,” they said, pointing behind them from the way they came. I looked at them. “Stop.” “Trail End.” I got more confused, since the trail end was behind me and I knew I was now in the trail-middle somewhere. I shrugged and continued on. Half a minute later I arrived at a 10-foot drop-off and realized what they had been talking about. I was apparently not on the right trail, once again following erroneus footprints. It was also really windy there. I am now convinced that the entire (enormous) Staircase-Escalante is a windy black hole. (But a really pretty one.)