How I hiked the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim within four days By: Trevis
I got the opportunity to hike the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim within just four day last October. It was one of the most adventurous hikes that I`ve done in my life. I was accompanied by two of my best friends on this hike.
This hike is never an easy one. I had to cover 42 miles, along with more than 21,000 vertical feet. We were traveling in just one direction, but still it was one of the biggest challenges that we had to overcome.
This hike goes through the lower Bright Angel canyon. During the hike, I was able to pass through dark rock walls, a lively creek, and go straight up for hundreds of feet on both my sides.
Before going on this hike, I did a bit of research about it on the internet. This is where I realized that most hikers are going through a challenging experience with this hike. We even came across such hikers. For example, there was a couple, where one of the headlamps had died for two hours before we found them. We are glad that we could help them to continue with the hike.
We started our hike on a bright beautiful day. The climate provided much-needed assistance for me and my friends to go ahead with the hike. As a rim to rim hiker, I was following the North Kaibab trail with my friends.
Mornings are quite challenging because of wind and cold temperatures. Sometimes rain can ruin travel plans. As expected, hard rain fell in the morning, and we did not have to go through any struggles because we were fully-ready for it.
Trekking poles provided much needed assistance to me and others throughout the hike. Without trekking poles, we could not have dealt with cumulative elevation gains and elevation losses.
Our four-day, almost 45-mile, rim-to-rim climb came to an end as I dragged myself up to Bright Angel in the last mile of the return trip when I heard a disturbance to my left. Two bighorn sheep suddenly came out of the scant undergrowth on the trail's downhill side, darted across it only ten feet ahead of me, and vanished in an instant as they scrambled up the incline on the trail's uphill side. There were no other hikers in sight at that precise time. The only one who saw them was me.
After a few minutes had passed, I was still buzzing from that fortuitous meeting when I saw the same bighorns leap onto the track once again, this time around 100 feet higher than before. They were moving so quickly past me as they ran down the path that I briefly worried I could be hit by them.
All in all, it was a great experience. We are glad that we could complete the hike as per our planning. This hike provided us the opportunity to get a variety of impressive experiences as well. We could not have got them from anywhere else.