LESSONS FROM A GRAND ADVENTURE

When my friend Maddy and I visited the Grand Canyon in 2008, we hiked a quarter of the way down and back up. Afterwards, we both thought we were going to die. As we nursed our near-death bodies back to health with a few glasses of wine at the Grand Canyon Lodge, we heard a chorus of whoops and yells drifting up from the canyon below. What sort of lunatics would be working their way UP the canyon so joyously? Soon enough, a group of sweaty, bedraggled backpackers emerged above the surface, arms raised and fists pumping.

“Where are you guys coming from?” I asked, as though there were a number of cities, towns and villages down there instead of a giant hole in the ground.

“THE OTHER SIDE!” one elated backpacker yelled in my face with a big smile, then pulled me in for a grimy hug. “RIM TO RIM, BABY!” His energy must have rubbed off on me along with days worth of canyon dust because a little voice popped in my head:

“I’m going to do that one day.”

Eleven years later, that day came. For my 40-Hour Sabbatical in 2019, I decided to hike the Grand Canyon. Rim to Rim baby. Here’s how it happened, and a few things that I learned along the way.

1. KEEP THE PROMISES YOU MAKE TO YOURSELF.

It’s one thing to lounge in the comfort of an Adirondack chair with a glass of wine in your hand and fantasize about doing something big and challenging . It’s another to sober up and confront the reality of how prepared — or not — you are to actually do that thing. In my case, I was attempting the biggest physical challenge of my life while being far from the greatest physical condition of my life (about 60 pounds and 15 years away, to be exact).

So even after I announced my 40-Hour Sabbatical, even after I applied for the permit to camp below the rim and got it, even after I paid the Four Seasons guide company, booked my hotel and plane ticket, and bought all the gear I needed, part of me was still looking for an out. And I almost found a few. First, Maddy ran out of vacation time and had to pull out. I had to either find another person to take her spot on the permit, or get assigned to a different rim-to-rim trip with people I didn’t know. Then, Hurricane Dorian started working its way towards Florida and was projected to hit the day I departed, forcing me to choose between giving up the trip altogether or ditching my family during a hurricane. Either one of these reasons would have been an easy, understandable reason (i.e. excuse) to back out without losing face. But it had already taken me eleven years to get to this point. I knew that if I kept waiting, it would be just like Dave Matthews warned in “Ants Marching”:

Take these chances
Place them in a box until a quieter time
Lights down, you up and die.

I could go ahead and try this thing that just might kill me. Or, I could put it off and eventually die anyway. No contest.

2. ONCE YOU’RE IN IT, PREP LIKE YOU MEAN IT.

As much of a bummer as it was that Maddy couldn’t make it, the friend I found to take her place turned out to be the exact person I needed with me on this journey. Kim and I have worked together for more than a decade and I’ve spent every second of it hoping to be more like her one day. She’s a three-time Ironman, two-time Mom, all-the-time awesome person who somehow manages to stay in killer shape, take great care of her family, be kind and supportive to everyone at work, and set aside ample time to party down with her girlfriends. When I asked if she wanted to take Maddy’s place on the permit, she texted me back, “I’m in” within two minutes. Over the next few months, she pushed me to train harder and more consistently than I ever would have done on my own. She had us climbing up and down stairs at 5 in the morning. Tromping for miles along clay roads with dumbbell-loaded backpacks. She never bailed on a single workout (heat and hangovers be damned) and because of that, I never did either. And she invited her friend Debbie — another Ironman/Mom/outstanding example of human capability — to join us on the hike. So when we finally hit the trail, I had not one, but TWO sets of Superwoman footsteps to follow (not to mention a personal photographer to follow me). I may never quite attain Kim and Debbie’s level of badassery, but just reaching for it made me stronger.

3. YOUR PLACE IN THE WORLD IS SMALLER THAN YOU THINK.

We descended from the North Rim, traveling along the North Kaibab trail through a woodsy forest with plenty of shade from the leafy green trees. Our tour guide Matt schooled us big time on Canyon geography. The top layer, the Kaibab, is made of grayish-white limestone containing fossils from the skeletons of sea creatures—this Canyon had been an ocean 250 millions years ago. We took our first rest stop two layers down in the Coconino, where reddish sandstone remains from the desert that was there 100 million years before the ocean. Further down, the shale of the Bright Angel layer has a blue-green tint from algae that lived in the lake which covered the area more than 500 million years ago. Each layer has a distinct color (a far cry from the uniform brown that the Canyon sometimes looks like in pictures) and tells a completely different story about the Earth—a being with a life of its own, whose events and cycles started long before we existed and will continue long after we’re gone.

4. AWESOME DOESN’T MEAN AWESOME EVERY SECOND.

The hike took four days: two days to descend from the North Rim to Phantom Ranch at the bottom, and two days to ascend from the Canyon floor up to the South Rim. We saw some awesome things along the way. We came across beautiful desert flowers that only bloom for a single night, right before they die. We encountered rattlesnakes, giant ravens and families of deer just outside our campgrounds. We splashed in waterfalls, took a dip in the icy Colorado River, and walked alongside the telephone lines that had first enabled rim-to-rim communication decades ago. We saw so many shooting stars that the night sky sometimes looked like a river ran through it. Still…while the entire experience and surroundings were truly awesome, some stretches were hard, scary and flat out sucked. Actually, I shouldn’t even say “flat” because nothing was actually flat—certainly not by Florida standards. Matt introduced us to the concept of “Canyon flat,” which basically meant a moderate hill, strenuous enough to make you breathe heavy and break a sweat, but not so steep you feared a stiff wind or your 30-lb. backpack was going to throw you off-balance and over the edge. Those stretches were called “tiny hills.” Other parts of the trail weren’t very steep at all, but were very narrow, with just a few feet of dirt between your trekking poles and the “plummet side,” which is exactly what it sounds like. In moments like these, I just did my best to remember the splendor surrounding the slog—and resist the urge to reach for that pretty, purple-y sandstone lying a little too close to the edge.

5. EVERYTHING LOOKS HARD FROM A DISTANCE.

Every morning when we hit the trail, Matt would point his trekking pole at some ridiculously far-off spot in the distance and tell us, “That’s where we’re going.” And every morning, my inner voice (and sometimes my outer voice) said the same thing: That’s fucking impossible. It didn’t help that, despite all my training, I was still the least physically fit person in our group. Of the six of us, four were Ironmen, one was a six-foot-four cyclist, and one was me. They hiked with the calm confidence and sturdy quads of people accustomed to extreme physical challenges. I huffed along behind, packing an asthma inhaler and about 30 extra pounds on my body, not just the 30 in my backpack. But I had no choice but to quit grumbling and keep going. As it turns out, my quads can handle more than my eyeballs gave them credit for. Once I was actually on the trail, the hike was hard, but never as hard as I’d feared from far away.

6. I’M STRONGER THAN I THINK, OR FEEL, OR TELL MYSELF...

AND THE PAYOFF IS MORE THAN WORTH THE HARD WORK.

I never did manage to silence that little “This is impossible” voice. It stuck with me, as sure and steady as if I’d clipped it to my pack with a carabiner. It complained about how hard and hot it was as we climbed the eight switchbacks that make up “The Devil’s Corkscrew.” It seriously doubted that the series of wading pools known as “The Birdbaths” would be worth the long, sun-scorched, uphill stretch we had to climb to reach them. It wondered if the view from the sacred site at the top of that grueling hill would be as spectacular as Matt said it would be. And, every day, when after four hours of hiking Matt told us our camp was “about fifteen minutes away” (i.e. forty-five minutes), it replied that there was no way I was going to make it that much longer. I just couldn’t shut up the self-defeating inner dialogue. So instead, I chose not to listen to it. I kept moving, one boot after the other, staying one step ahead of my doubts. Lo and behold: I made it to where we were going every single time. And every single time, it was worth the effort.

7. STAY OPEN TO THE SACRED…

WHATEVER FORM IT TAKES.

I’m not a religious person, but I am a believer….in what, I’m not quite sure. But I have had some moments in life where I’ve felt a deep and undeniable communion with whatever it is I believe in. My first glimpse of Ribbon Falls was one of them. The natives who once lived in the Canyon believed it to be a sacred place: where our spirits emerge into the physical world for the first time. When I first emerged from the wooded trail that led to the falls, I could see why—actually, “see” might be the wrong word. Yes, it was beautiful. But even more striking than what I saw was what I felt. Like I’d opened a door into something eternal. A place that had always been there waiting for me, and was as joyful as I was that I’d finally arrived.

It happened again on our last night. We had dinner at Plateau Point, a rock formation about a mile from Indian Garden campground. Up to then, the hike had led us to some of the Canyon’s small, secret wonders. Tucked-away waterfalls. Hidden wading pools. Wide, deserted stretches of beach along the banks of the Colorado River. Plateau Point offered the exact opposite. With uninterrupted views of the Canyon in every direction, you could almost grasp the vastness that this place, and this moment, and you, are part of. Almost. In the endless vista, two peaks stood out: Shiva and Vishnu. I was surprised to learn that a handful of the Canyon’s peaks are named for Hindu deities. My last brush with Hinduism came a few 40-Hour Sabbaticals ago, when I went to a yoga and meditation retreat in Colorado. On the last night of that retreat, during a ceremony honoring the deity Ganesh, I’d experienced one of those profound moments of connection. Echoes of that feeling rippled through me when I spotted Shiva and Vishnu lit aflame by the setting sun. Whatever it is I connect to, here was a reminder that it’s everywhere, and always there.

8. REMEMBER TO LOOK BACK ONCE IN A WHILE

TO RECOGNIZE HOW FAR YOU’VE COME.

For our final 3,000-foot ascent on day four, we went into march mode. There were no little detours. No side hikes to secret resting spots off the beaten path. Just the steady, switchback-heavy climb from Indian Garden campground to the Bright Angel Trailhead on the South Rim. We were so tired—tired of hiking, tired of lugging our packs, tired of smelling ourselves in the clothes that had been collecting sweat and Canyon dust for the past three days. But as ready as we all were for the journey to be over, we made sure to stop several times along the way to look back and take in just how far we’d come. I couldn’t help but picture my younger self sitting pretty on the other side eleven years ago, sipping a glass of wine and looking out over this vast expanse, imagining what it might be like to make it to the other side. Daring myself to try. Kim, my champion until the very end, made the others move aside so I could finish my 40-Hour Sabbatical at the head of our group. I felt the tears well up as I approached the trailhead, and they spilled out just a tiny bit when my boot hit the pavement at the top. I brushed them away quickly and whispered, to myself then and now, “Rim-to-rim baby. You did it.”

BONUS LESSONS:
STOCK UP ON YOUR ESSENTIALS

REMEMBER, THERE’S STILL SO MUCH MORE OUT THERE TO EXPLORE.