Grand Canyon Winter: March 2023
It’s A Happy Place
“You come here a lot, don’t you?” replied always-subdued Daniel while still staring at his
computer screen when I checked-in at Trailer Village, the Grand Canyon National Park’s (GCNP) only RV park. “We love it here; I don’t know, maybe we’ve been here 15 or 20 times.” Escaping the violence in Miami, Daniel had different priorities than us, and he couldn’t understand why we spent 6 weeks a year in the Park, especially like now, when there were huge piles of snow all around his little concrete block building.
The Grand Canyon is our favorite US destination for sporting activities and Trailer Village within the park boundaries, is our favorite trailer park. Here, we have a spacious site where I can usually reserve one of our preferred spots with unobstructed sunlight all day long. In Palm Springs, the proximity to 2 exceptional trails makes living in tiny, hedge-flanked slots worth the bit of claustrophobia; at nearby Joshua Tree National Park, we settle for the roomy but dreary, gravel-pit-styled grounds for its proximity to the least busy Park entrance; but at Trailer Village, we see towering ponderosa pines against the big blue skies, sunsets, and sunrises. Too-tame elk roam the grounds with first time visitors chasing them for photos; ravens cruise looking for help-yourself snacks by puncturing sewer hoses; and the trailers range from homemade trophies to $2 million coaches, so there is always something to capture our attention when we gaze out from our large dinette window.
It’s A Happy Place
“You come here a lot, don’t you?” replied always-subdued Daniel while still staring at his
computer screen when I checked-in at Trailer Village, the Grand Canyon National Park’s (GCNP) only RV park. “We love it here; I don’t know, maybe we’ve been here 15 or 20 times.” Escaping the violence in Miami, Daniel had different priorities than us, and he couldn’t understand why we spent 6 weeks a year in the Park, especially like now, when there were huge piles of snow all around his little concrete block building.
The Grand Canyon is our favorite US destination for sporting activities and Trailer Village within the park boundaries, is our favorite trailer park. Here, we have a spacious site where I can usually reserve one of our preferred spots with unobstructed sunlight all day long. In Palm Springs, the proximity to 2 exceptional trails makes living in tiny, hedge-flanked slots worth the bit of claustrophobia; at nearby Joshua Tree National Park, we settle for the roomy but dreary, gravel-pit-styled grounds for its proximity to the least busy Park entrance; but at Trailer Village, we see towering ponderosa pines against the big blue skies, sunsets, and sunrises. Too-tame elk roam the grounds with first time visitors chasing them for photos; ravens cruise looking for help-yourself snacks by puncturing sewer hoses; and the trailers range from homemade trophies to $2 million coaches, so there is always something to capture our attention when we gaze out from our large dinette window.
The look of atmospheric river #10’s snow the day we arrived.
The Park is a bucket-list destination for many, and it shows when our fellow tourists venture off the path to the unfenced cliff edges for selfies and group photos. They lean against scrubby trees, pose in silly positions, and pay too little attention to good photo composition by our standards. Even when an unexpected snow flurry hit, the folks in T-shirts and shorts were undeterred, they were exuberant and having fun, except for the occasional sullen teenager. No one can live within the Park unless they work there, so essentially everyone we share the trails with are self-satisfied guests like us.
Ah, we do love this place!
On our first full day in GCNP, we returned to the trailer from our individual walks about 3 pm to enjoy its warmth while looking at the gray skies. It had been lovely until about 1 pm and the welcome shelter of the trailer reminded us of the sharp winds that had accompanied the threatened clouds when they rolled in. After removing my heavy outer layers of clothing and while savoring a cup of hot tea, I felt a deep contentment flow through me. Yes, we love this place!
The mental complexity of navigating the very steep S Kaibab trail is always engaging and on this day with my still-vulnerable back, and with the deep snow, mud, and bits of ice on the route, it had been even more so. My brain was contented with having played the trail game well with its new hazards and I was pleased that my body had been unscathed by the effort.
It wasn’t a long distance, only about 3 miles round trip, but the gyrations required with each step were novel for this newest iteration of my healing body. And then there were the unusually captivating snowy views. I knew the trail well and yet the variable depth of the snow gave it a fresh look. There is nowhere else that we play that satisfies our minds and bodies on so many levels like the GCNP does.
Two of these 3 resourceful visitors had taped plastic bags over their white shoes.
Recalibrating
Usually, our fitness level and endurance are peaking for the year when we arrive in the GCNP in the fall. It’s here in October that we usually do 46 miles (74 km) in 2 days when we hike between the South and North Rims and back again after a short night’s sleep in a very expensive cabin. With luck, we repeated that epic hike again about a week later. But Rim-2-Rim season was over because of snow until mid-May, and we had come to enjoy our 2nd backpack trip down into the Canyon.
This March, we arrived in the GCNP with our respective fitness levels at an all-time low. My chronic buttock pain issues that had been dogging me for close to 10 years exploded into a crisis on Christmas Day when it took all my resolve to extract myself from bed to use the toilet between bouts of excruciating back pain.
Ten days later, Bill had a retinal surgery that required him to scale-back his exertion to suppress his heart rate during the 6-week healing period. By the time we arrived at GCNP, Bill was out-of-shape but could go ‘full steam ahead’, whereas I carefully listened to my body when I began moving each morning to make my best guess of what it would allow me to do. Exerting at our current “maximal sustainable pace” meant that we hiked and walked alone most days, with me usually doing half the distance or less that Bill would knock-out.
Disappointed, but undeterred by the weather and trail conditions, we crafted our separate plans to take advantage of the GCNP’s fitness opportunities. In deference to the nasty feelings that arise from ascending to this 7000’ location with altitude intolerance, Bill did long, relatively flat, walks on the South Rim asphalt trail our first 4 days. In hindsight, limiting himself to the Rim walk for 1 full day would have sufficed.
Fortunately, my spinal/buttock pain issues were enough better when we arrived in the Park that I dared to descend in the snow and mud on our favorite trail, the S Kaibab. Like I had hoped, the trail was ideal for rehab’ing my right knee, which needs the stability of buff quads to be comfortable when under pressure. Ten weeks off trails had taken its toll on the necessary muscle bulk and coaxing the quad tone back with wall squats and light use of our vertical climber only annoyed my knee further. The “every step is different” quality of ascending on a trail seemed to be a kinder way to strengthen it than home gym routines.
After my ambitious hike into the Inner Canyon on our first full day, I too resigned myself to Rim walking. The next day was too soon for a 2nd sustained gain hike for me and the following 2 days of intermittent rain dictated 3 days of tamer trails. We would recover and indulge in relative rest to do our best on Sunday, the better weather day.
The top of S Kaibab Trail on Barb’s first descent.
Like I had hoped, my timing was perfect: we both crafted our own pair of routines from the posted list, which we did on alternate days. We had both suffered from protracted de-conditioning and we were both motivated to reverse it but knew that we needed to be cautious to avoid injury. Invariably, when using weights, I would overdo and either injure myself or get so sore that I stopped the program. Bill’s chronically weak back was also vulnerable to overdoing and he too often experienced failure.
With our new program that focused on muscle building for speed and endurance activities rather than maximum strength, Bill dedicated every other day to the “Back Mechanic’s” book’s exercises that resonated with him for his life-long back issues. Even though I bought the book for me, it was better targeted to his presumed disc issues than my spinal root nerves ones, so I selected my own routines for alternate days.
Conveniently, we both opted to do our resistance training before breakfast, which I later read optimized muscle building. We each deliberately eat a breakfast with a minimum of 30 grams of protein to fend-off sarcopenia, or the muscle wasting of aging, and those 30 grams are best utilized immediately after exercise. It was the old echo of our daily lifestyle “exercise/eat, exercise/eat, exercise/eat.” I was a bit sore each day but not so much as to interfere with walking or discourage me from doing my second routine the next day. I however skipped the resistance training on bigger hike days.
Bill was horrified by the completeness of his core muscle weakness once he began his new resistance training program but was buoyed by how quickly he was beginning to reclaim the missing strength. I coaxed my body along with afternoon counterposes and use of a clay-filled hot pack to release the muscles I made cranky with my outdoor excursions.
The Inner Canyon of the Bright Angel Trail.
After discussing the status of my spinal condition towards the end of our 2-week stay, Bill summarized my recovery with “You are taking 2-steps forward and 1 to 2 steps backwards.” Only with keen observation of the subtleties, could we discern that my trend was definitely upwards. Here, at the almost 3-month point since being stopped in my tracks with white-out pain on Christmas Day, I was effective with what the geriatricians call “the chores of daily living,” but I was at less than 20% of my athletic capabilities.
The low point at the GCNP had been when disabling pain struck 10 minutes into a flat, asphalt path walk. I pressed-on to walk for an hour, making 3 stops to apply my best antidotes for the pain, hoping to crack the code, with little success. I paid for my hopeful persistence with immobilizing brain fog from the pain the rest of the day. A week later, I suffered 2 tortured night’s sleep in which the “I can’t even walk a half a mile without pain” became the pivot point for nightmares about pain, disability, dysfunction, and social isolation. I’d considered myself lucky to have fended off the frequent bouts of daytime frustration and depression over the last 3 months, but having the fear and uncertainty taunt me in the dark was daunting.
Inexplicably, I did better going up and down the steep Inner Canyon trails than walking on the relatively flat S Rim trail. After my previous crash-and-burn on one level path, I had thought that that might be true, as crazy as it seemed. For the last 20 years, I’d jokingly referred to long urban walks as creating overuse injuries in me because of the limited range of motion, and now we wondered if that was my body’s wisdom whispering.
The mules & Barb rested on the S Kaibab Trail at Cedar Ridge with snow on the distant N Rim.
My slow pace on the S Kaibab trail was about 1.5 miles per hour and I spent as much time sitting along the way to allow the pain to subside as I spent moving. I spent 4 to 5 hours on the trail to do the 3 miles, including rest time during lunch. It was definitely rehab, not hiking, but it worked.
I started my tediously slow rehab outing about 8:30 to allow an additional 4 hours of daylight beyond my expected return time, to shuffle back to the Rim, if needed. The first time or 2 on the trail, I took a headlamp in case the additional 4 hours was insufficient to cover the 1.5 miles.
Doing the steep trails back up was the only way I could elevate my heart rate at my required slow pace, and it allowed me to begin reconditioning my knees that demand regular, intense exercise to keep the knee-joint stabilizing muscles strong. After 4 days of this modest effort, I’d done 12 trail miles with a body that recently could knock-out 20 miles in one day and over 40 miles in 2 days. My knees, that have been nicely adapted for years to 20-mile, big-gain days, were achy and swollen after those 4 days. A few three-mile days, done slowly and with excessive rest, was all I could do but I was grateful to do it without literally having to crawl out.
My measured successes on the trail quieted my night terrors by reassuring me that there was still a pathway out of pain and dysfunction for me. Unanswered was whether I’d ever again walk between the south and north rims, though I enjoyed reminiscing about our 15 prior canyon crossings with each trip I made down into the Canyon. I’d keep the N Rim room reservations I’d secured for October and hope for the best.
Bill was much faster and stronger on the trails than I, but he had to abandon our planned winter loop of hiking from the SK, down to Phantom Ranch on the Colorado River, and back up the (Bright Angel) BA trail. It’s an all-day, 18-mile hike as it is, and the snow and ice on both trails would have slowed his pace too much.
A landslide & boulder on Bright Angel Trail.
Atmospheric rivers (AR) shaped our late-winter visit to the GCNP. We arrived in the Park on March 7th, on the heels of the 10th AR since the first of the year. Like AR #1-9, it traveled north from southern California and #10 dropped feet of snow in the GCNP area on the days before our arrival.
We fretted about the driving conditions on the 7000’ elevation roads into the park and indeed, the roads were just clear enough for driving on our scheduled arrival day. A week later, on March 15th, the day we were to step off the South Rim onto Hermit’s Trail for our 2nd backpack trip in the Park, AR #11 of the winter season hit the Park—about a day after clobbering the California coast. We’d already canceled the Backcountry reservation for a tent site for 2 nights because I was in no condition to backpack, but now, it would have been a non-starter for us because of the weather.
We were aghast the morning of our scheduled backpack trip to see our 3 neighbors heading out with huge backpacks and seemingly no rain pants, in the downpour. They (like us) didn’t look like accomplished athletes, and we hoped they were not as foolish as they appeared. Presumably, the elevation of their campsite would be low enough to dodge the forecast overnight snow, but the rain was not predicted to abate until sunrise the next day.
Our day hikes on the 2 primary trails down into the canyon in the snow, ice, slush, and mud were slow and challenging enough without doing them in steady rain with ginormous packs. Staying dry is a relative thing when out all day in the rain and their tents would quickly become saturated, if not while erecting them, then after entering them wearing layers of drenched clothing. It’s compelling to segregate those wet garments to keep other items in the tent dry, like your sleeping bag, but if you wad them up and stuff them in a corner, the water pools in them and they become wet on the inside, if they weren’t already.
The Bright Angel boulder would be there a while.
The stressed but smiling young woman I engaged said “Yes” when I asked if her tent had leaked when it started raining about sunset the night before. She didn’t offer many words but agreed to all my comments, like “That is so miserable, that’s really disappointing, that is so difficult.” We’d never been flooded in a tent, only an “overly damp” one, both from minor tent leaks and from just too much rain. I assumed that they were staying in the adjacent campground and hadn’t come up one of the Inner Canyon Trails like our neighbors soon would do.
From the comfort of our rain-tight trailer that day, we watched many of our Trailer Village neighbors break camp to cut-short their stay in the GCNP. We also again recalled our backpacking neighbors who headed out in the rain that morning, and the backpackers we’d chatted with on the trail 2 days before.
All the descending hikers we spoke with knew that they were literally walking into a storm and days later, some of the ascending backpackers spoke of surviving tent-flattening winds. One extremely competent mother-daughter pair shared their delight in spending the 2nd night of their 2-night trip in a heated cabin at Phantom Ranch. They beamed while describing their good fortune in nabbing a cancelation after having survived the windy night in tents on a plateau.
The rain had been the subject of our nightmare, but the backpacker’s stories were all about the fierce overnight winds. The winds had been especially onerous on the mid-elevation trail, the Tanto. One man reported that it required 4 people to assemble a single tent in the wind and that the all-nights winds sounded like freight trains.
Tackling the S Kaibab Trail boulder.
Inner Canyon Care
On March 16, the morning after AR #11 hit the GCNP, we returned to the S Kaibab Trail (SK), our favorite trail in the Park. Like 2 days before on Bright Angel Trail (BA), we encountered several small clusters of rock fall and a single large boulder filling the upper trail. But unlike on BA, a crew of 5 park service rangers were busy working to destroy the boulder on the SK.
Mule trains carrying supplies to Phantom Ranch at the Colorado River and garbage up from it, as well as Park guests weighing less than 200 pounds, and Park Service gear, ply both trails. The BA had been abandoned for mule travel since AR #10 brought feet of snow to the canyon. Even 10 days later, it was still too treacherous for the mules, even without the boulder. It was markedly snowier, icier, and more treacherous than the more sun exposed SK to us as well. The rangers would get to the BA boulder eventually, but for now, the hikers and backpackers were on their own to navigate around it. For the rangers, the priority was keeping the SK open for mule traffic.
One by one, the rangers drilled 18 holes 2-3 feet deep into the boulder, filled each hole with water and a non-dynamite explosive the size of a shotgun shell, covered it with a 40-pound steel plate, and detonated it. If they were lucky, a single blast would fracture the boulder into a dozen chunks that could be troddled over the side of the trail. On this day, it required 18 holes and 18 blasts, not single one, to break the rock into manageable chunks. Luckily, none of the many switchbacks were beneath the boulder, so the fragments could readily be dispatched over the edge.
Boulder obliteration on the S Kaibab trail.
I also learned from the rangers that, to the best of their knowledge, none of the the tourists we’d seen slipping and sliding on the icy trails had killed themselves. They only new of 1 rescue, which was of several backpackers on the Grand View trail that was closed, perhaps after their rescue.
Lemonade
“Lemonade from lemons” is a favorite euphemism to punctuate when we make the pivot from a nasty situation to an improved one, and it was yelped when we discovered the app at: https://www.weatherontheway.app.
At the end of our GCNP stay, the rain due from Atmospheric River #12 between 4-6 pm morphed into a snowstorm that abruptly began at 1:30 pm. After about 2 hours, Bill started checking the 2 weather apps for the Park, neither of which had been anywhere near being accurate, aiming to decide if we should leave a day early: tomorrow on Monday morning or stick to our Tuesday departure day.
While I was in the trailer’s shower and Bill was entering his 2nd hour of melding weather forecasts with possible routes, I thought that there must be a better way. Sure enough, a quick search once out of the shower, yielded 8 possible apps. The Google and Apple products seemed to have evaporated, but weatherontheway hit pay dirt. It was love at first sight. “Too good to be true. Do you know how much time this will save us? This is wonderful. Love it, love it. This takes all the pain out of planning. I never dreamed there would be an app like that.” Bill’s frustration and aggravation turned to to joy, then bliss. Problem solved!
One of our reindeer admired the snow fall at 29 Palms, the first of many this spring.
Unfortunately, our new app failed us the next morning when, after spending an extra half hour removing the snow from the awning-like topper on our trailer slide-out, we discovered the hard way that our road out of the GCNP had been closed since the night before. Somehow, the nifty app missed the closure. Apparently, it wasn’t just a near-miss, because when Bill checked the Park’s update information around noon, the road was still closed. The new app did however deliver the information needed to make alternate route choices on the fly. With the off-and-on rain and snow and temperatures hovering above freezing, we were reassured to readily check on the constantly changing conditions.
It Was Quite the Wintery Spring Break!
We’d left Palm Springs on March 1st in a light snow flurry that persisted through our arrival in nearby 29 Palms the same day. We left 29 Palms a few days later with an AR from the coast dumping several feet of snow in the Grand Canyon ahead of us, though we arrived there with neat piles of snow surrounding dry pavement. It snowed several times in the Grand Canyon while we were there and the trails into the canyon all had icy starts.
We departed the GCNP a day early to dodge yet another AR while in transit. Our 2-day drive from the Grand Canyon became a 3-day trek because of a road closure and a need to stick to lower elevation passes to reach Fruita, Colorado, only to be met there by more snow and rain from AR #12. Like many people in the US, all we could do was say “It’s been quite the winter!” and hope seasonal weather would soon return.