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.
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