Day 31: 26 April, 15.5 miles today, 583.4 miles total, Coconino National Forest
The upside to having to cross ten to twelve miles of snow in the next section was that in order to start doing so as early in the day as possible (when it would be harder and easier to walk on), we could only do 15 or 16 miles the first day out of town—meaning that Sean Meadow and I got to sleep in a little. I relished my extra town time eating cold leftover pizza in the hotel bed, which I’m pretty sure everyone can agree is pretty much the apogee of the human experience. Not even the abysmal complimentary coffee could diminish that high, despite the fact that that flavor profile is what I imagine farm runoff must taste like.
Eventually, though, we had to shoulder our packs and make our way back to the trail. A full food bag, necessary though it is to surviving the next section of hiking, always feels like a punishment meted out for the crime of being silly enough to keep going back out to the woods. After finishing every day of the last stretch feeling vaguely famished, we’d each purchased even more food for the next five-ish days, with the result that it felt like we’d just buckled full-grown black bears with full bellies onto our backs—a fact we would complain about the rest of the day any time we were within earshot of one another.
Flagstaff boasts a series of unpaved inter-urban hiking/biking trails, so once we’d covered the 3/4 mile back to the route, we only ended up having to walk on two or three blocks of pavement before we were back on a dirt path. Then it was simply a matter of following the right track into the hills north of town. It would have been an incredibly easy day of our heavy packs hadn’t been beating our spirits into the ground. As it was, by the time we got to the area where we’d planned to camp, we were both exhausted—and cold, as the climbing we’d done all day had left us at a higher elevation than I’d had to pitch my tent the entire AZT up to that point. We ate a quick, hot dinner, then bundled up and headed for the safety of our tents, hoping against all reason for a warm and cozy night.
Day 32: 27 April, 22.2 miles today, 605.6 miles total, Coconino National Forest
Maybe it’s because we both went to bed wearing every layer we had, but we both managed to keep comfortably toasty all night—a fact made all the more surprising when we stumbled out of our tents and into the early morning chill. Still, it was a promising start to a day we assumed would be challenging enough without fatigue dragging us down before we even started. We’d be climbing high enough into the San Francisco Peaks that we’d have to cross several miles of snow, which would not only make walking more difficult, but also meant that any potential drinking water in that area was either still frozen or buried under several feet of powder.
We solved the latter problem—and a few miles’ worth of the former—by bushwhacking from our campsite up to a paved road that ran parallel to the AZT all the way to the Arizona Snowbowl, a ski resort parked halfway up a drainage between Humphrey’s and Agassiz Peaks. We made pretty good time despite the road’s steep uphill grade and strolled up to the Lodge only to discover that it was locked, and wouldn’t be open for nearly two hours. Thankfully, a staff member happened by just as we were trying to sort out what to do, and after some initial resistance on his part, Sean Meadow was able to charm him into letting us fill up our water bottles inside the building. As he walked us back out, we thanked him profusely before having a quick snack on the patio outside and heading down toward the AZT.
Our plan had been to cross as much of the snow as we could early in the day, while it was still firm enough to support our weight—and for the most part it worked. Despite several feet of coverage for several miles, we rarely broke through the surface, though hiking atop snow is always a chore even when you can avoid post-holing every other step. It takes twice the energy to take each step as it would over solid ground, and though the landscape was sparkling and clean and grand and lovely, blanketed as ot was by a think rolling sheet of snow, by the time we’d walking on it for a couple of hours, I was so exhausted I couldn’t think straight. I was just fixated on Sean Meadow’s figure moving through the woods ahead of me. As long as I didn’t lose sight of her, I figured, I’d be fine.
As the trail took a downhill turn, the snow started to thin out with surprising speed, which was for the best as by now the midday heat was softening the surface enough that our feet were starting to break through and we were post-holing up to our knees every few minutes. Soon enough, however, there were no more than a few inches to sink into, and then we only had to contend with patches and mud. By the time we stopped for lunch, the trail was open and dry—and somehow we’d walked straight off a snow-covered, lushly forested mountain and right back into the desert.
The rest of the day was dusty, rocky, and pretty monotonous—except perhaps for the side quest we had to undertake to find water in the afternoon, which involved hiking a quarter mile off trail, finding an impenetrable steel water tank, following a buried pipe from the tank to a rusted steel trough surrounded by barbed wire, and filtering the strange yellow concoction we found there into drinkable water. After that, we just walked through dried yellow grass and harsh, stunted shrubs until we found an unadorned flat spot sheltered from the wind and decided to call it for the day. We were back to long water carries and uninspired topography, it would seem. But at least we were through the snow, and warm, at that.
Day 33: 28 April, 24.9 miles today, 630.5 miles total, the middle of fucking nowhere
It was, I realized as I stepped into the brisk air of morning twilight, the warmest night I’d had on the AZT. I’d still used a liner in addition to my sleeping bag, but I hadn’t worn my base layer to bed—a first for this trail—and I’d been perfectly comfortable. I hadn’t sleep terribly well, but that was due more to the stupid sand-in-the-sock injury I’d given myself a couple of days out of Pine. Every time I brushed the heel of my right foot against anything, I woke up in a sudden flash of pain. Much like the split-thumb wound I’d had earlier on the trek, I was finding that things out here seemed to heal very slowly. Hopefully I could make it to the Grand Canyon without damaging myself any further. In all likelihood, I only had to remain mostly whole for two more days, then I supposed I could injure myself as much as I wanted.
We had entered the desert proper: the only variation in scenery was now a gradual shift back and forth between open forests of stunted chaparral and rolling, grassy veldts. There was no shelter from the wind or the sun, and every one of the widely-spaced water sources was muddy, slimy, and thick—the last of these being some 0.5 miles off trail and guarded both by a sun-bleached cow’s skull and a much more recently perished giant crow, which I could only assume had died of loneliness. Some part of me had assumed that we would bop along the rest of the way north through thick pines forests with clear running streams, but the AZT had to shit on my dreams at least this one last time. C’est la vie. At least we weren’t cold.
In fact, the heat of the day had become rather brutal. It’s a weird quirk of desert hiking that even if the ambient temperature never gets much above 60°, the intensity of the afternoon sun nonetheless makes it feel like you’re burning alive. Days like this often pass in a blur of aching feet and grim determination, but with the feeling at the end of it all you’ve accomplished something, just by walking from one end of a vast expanse of nothing to the other. This day was better than that, though, with the northern face of the San Francisco Peaks rising to prominence behind us as the ground below us slowly rose toward the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. True, this spectacular snow-garlanded view was at our backs most of the day, but both Sean Meadow and I made a point of looking over our shoulders as we walked, and we ate lunch and dinner in locations chosen for both their commanding view and shade. To be alone in this wilderness is worth sore feet and a bit of sun. In truth, I’d have been willing pay a great deal more.
Day 34: 29 April, 24.2 miles today, 654.7 miles total, Kaibab National Forest
“April is the cruelest month,” opens Eliot’s masterpiece of modernist poetry, “The Waste Land.” I assume that the wastes in question can only be the Arizona desert, where the poor poet must once have spent a mean-spirited spring. Sean Meadow and I had gone into our tents believing that we’d be in for another warm night—especially since we’d dropped even further in elevation since the evening before. Alas for our sorry butts, which froze off when the temperature plummeted an hour after sunset.
The chill persisted, of course, in the morning as I stuck my head out of my tent just in time to catch the first rays of dawn as the sun peaked above the eastern horizon. By the time we were ready to hike, however, it was already almost uncomfortably warm. It was a hot day for hiking, and any time we had to cross a broad, unshaded swath of trail, it felt like we were being punched by sunlight. Fortunately, as we started slowly climbing in elevation, the scrub brush countryside was gradually replaced by pine forest. By the time we stopped for lunch amid broken beer bottles and spent 30.06 casings at a small lake accessible by road, the trees were dense enough that we were happily under cover most of the time—though fresh water was as scarce, and unpleasant tasting—as ever. Thank god for blessing us with hiker-friendly packets of Crystal Light.
We made pretty good time, though the hardpan was steadily pounding our feet into raw hamburger. Toward mid-afternoon we started catching the occasional glimpse of the Grand Canyon‘a North Rim, a towering reminder that this segment of the hike was nearly over—as the Park Service had closed the Kaibab Trail section of the AZT across the canyon (and had recently taken to threatening thru-hikers on facebook with multi-thousand dollar fines if they chose to ignore the closure), we would be stopping upon reaching the South Rim. Assuming we were not struck by disaster, we would get there the following day, leaving the last 100ish miles for another outing. Maybe we’d be back in June. Maybe not.
In the meantime, we were determined to get to a fire tower in dispersed-camping area popular with RV campers before our feet degenerated to the consistency of partially-congealed jello. To that end, we popped up off the AZT and onto a Forest Service road, which saved us just over a mile and a half and got us into camp in time to bask in the smoke of other campers’ fires while we sat in the dirt with our shoes off, letting our bare feet throb in the golden light of evening. We helped ourselves to a hearty dinner, knowing that with only one day of hiking left we were past the need to ration our food, and I climbed 50’ up the fire tower before remembering that heights on open structures like that scare the shit out of me. Still, the glimpse of the canyon I got was a spectacular preview for what we’d be hiking into the next day. All we had to do was find a way to sleep while our neighbors yammered on past dark, yell-talking like they were in a crowded bar and not the still, silent woods of Northern Arizona during the ass-end of the year’s cruelest month.
Day 35: 30 April, 20.2 miles today, 674.9 miles total, Grand Canyon National Park
The end of a hike is always bittersweet and abrupt, no matter how long you’ve watched it approaching on the horizon. This turns out to be true even when you’re only stopping because of a temporary trail closure, albeit one without a viable alternate route that is scheduled to continue for at least another month. But we did know this end was coming, so after sleeping deeply (but still not nearly enough) in our unexpectedly warm tents, we woke to start the day with a sense of finality. “Just one more day and we don’t have to walk anymore!” Sean Meadow exclaimed as we threw on our packs. I was a little more ambivalent.
Though the hardened clay of the last section had really beaten the everloving shit out my feet, I had really loved the AZT. Unpretentious, quiet, open, and uncrowded, it had given me everything I could ask from a thru-hike: solitude, adventure, spectacular scenery, a small and enthusiastic community, challenging terrain, and the kind of hard-earned, exhausted serenity that comes from physically working against a physical ordeal from sunup to sundown. For five weeks (with a break in the middle) the AZT had been my home. After today, I knew, I would be leaving it without any idea when I might be able to return for those last lonely 100 miles to Utah.
But damn it would be good to get a break from walking on that unforgiving soil. The first few hours weren’t really so bad. Our feet had recovered overnight and in the cool of the morning the forest had the feel of a well-groomed city park—though one both impossibly massive and impossibly empty. We made our way to the day’s only natural water source, a cow pond fenced in by barbed wire. One look at the debris-laden water, teeming with wild varieties of invertebrate life, and I questioned who exactly that barrier was erected to protect this mud puddle from. But no matter; I needed water. I was only grateful that this was the last trauma I would be subjecting my poor water filter to before I could give it a thorough cleaning.
After we left that small break, the day became something of a slog. My feet started to throb from slapping against the hard forest floor, and the unfiltered sun started to cook me in my hiking clothes like a tamale in its husk. By the time we reached the tourist trap town of Tusayan for lunch, I was starving, hot, uncomfortable, and in no mood to navigate a town for which our primary map had proven to be completely unreliable. My voice had become a rasp that Sean Meadow struggled to understand, even as it felt to me like I was practically shouting to be heard. I needed something cold to drink, and fast. We both did. I shudder to think what might have happened had we not stumbled across a Wendy’s just down the block.
After lunch, which featured some highly forgettable food, but a tall, frosty name-brand root beer the memory of which I shall cherish forever, we set out to finish off this section. In an effort to intentionally cater to bicyclists (and unintentionally the ding-dongs who ride their e-bikes on paths like this as if they were their own private highways), the trail from Tusayan to canyon itself is paved—which does not help feet that are already tired and bruised. The walk into the park was not particularly scenic, or really pleasant in any way. But we covered the miles in no time at all. By mid-afternoon we were standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon really is one of the Earth’s great natural wonders—which is, course, why it is perennially crowded with visitors from all over the planet. It’s always a bit of a shock to discover how quickly you can move from the almost total isolation of a lonely forest track, to being completely awash in strangers, on foot, in cars, on buses, on e-bikes and scooters. I suppose if you weren’t mentally prepared for the crowds, it would really be a gigantic bummer to find a spot so utterly, breathtakingly awe-inspiring so utterly, breathtakingly clogged with tourists; but I think there is something to be said for a shared experience of wonder in the face of something so impossibly vast, ornate, and intricate, even if part of that experience is amusement at standing back and watching a few hundred people simultaneously try to get a selfie with the canyon that elides all the other human beings around them trying to do the exact same thing.
We didn’t stay long. Both Sean Meadow and I were exhausted—we’d pushed hard to get to the South Rim, and we still had to get all the back to Flagstaff to pick up her car. We looked across the elaborately carved spires and valleys for an hour, then tracked down the bus that would take us across the park to the lodge where we could find a shuttle back to the town where we’d started this stretch. I would come to back to this place, I knew, someday, but the uncertainly as to the timing of my return gave our departure a melancholy edge. A hundred miles still stood between me and the Utah border, but for now, anyway, our time on the Arizona Trail was done.
