Emily Takes a Hike

Over the past several months, I’ve really struggled with the decision to share this story. It’s not an easy one to tell, for reasons that will soon become abundantly clear. To say the least, I’ve never felt more vulnerable on any trail than I did on Nankoweap, and in many ways, writing about this experience makes me feel like an imposter, pretending to be somebody else in a place where I didn’t belong. However, publicly acknowledging my own naivety isn’t the most difficult part of telling this story. The more overwhelming challenge lies in allowing the severity of this place to outshine its unparalleled beauty. This trail is in a league of its own. As Megan, the friend who joined me on this hike, and I have discussed many times since, there are no words that accurately describe Nankoweap. They don’t exist, and nobody who hasn’t experienced this trail firsthand can possibly understand what it’s really like to hike what the National Park Service identifies as the most difficult named trail in the Grand Canyon.

My greatest hesitation to share this story is the risk of exposing Nankoweap’s relentless allure to others like me, experienced hikers who foolishly disregard precautionary tales and adopt the “that won’t happen to me” mentality when chasing their next great adventure. I know it sounds ridiculous and arrogant, but it’s easy to succumb to an invincibility complex when you’ve never really been threatened. With that in mind, this post is not intended to provide guidance to anyone considering this trail. If anything, I hope my manifesto of stupidity discourages others from attempting it, because simply avoiding my errors won’t be enough to protect you here. Please accept this story as nothing more than an ode to all the mistakes that could have killed me. Under no circumstances should anyone attempt to hike this trail without extensive experience hiking below the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Our journey to Nankoweap began with botched backpacking plans at Yosemite. Due to the wildfires that plagued California last September and the unpredictability of COVID-related travel restrictions, we realized a few weeks in advance of our planned trip that we’d need to change our destination. We decided to fly into Las Vegas instead of San Francisco and rent a camper van for a road trip through Utah and Arizona. By the time we set our sights on the Grand Canyon, we’d missed the window of opportunity to apply for camping permits along one of the more forgiving (but still very strenuous) corridor trails. A rim to rim hike along the standard route would have been ideal, but aside from missing the deadline to apply for permits, we didn’t have any transportation options for returning to our starting point after the hike, because shuttles weren’t running due to COVID. To put it into perspective, it takes several hours to drive between the trailheads for the corridor routes through the Grand Canyon, because you have to literally drive around the canyon to get from one rim to the other. Ride share services aren’t reliable because of the distance and remoteness of the area. Since we’d be traveling to the Grand Canyon from Utah and working with a limited time frame, we knew we’d need to start from and return to the North Rim, where trailheads with access to the bottom of the canyon are much more sparse than they are along the South Rim.

I’d read legends about Nankoweap, but I didn’t think it’d be a realistic option for us until we had no other choices for hiking to the Colorado River and back during our small window of opportunity. I wanted to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon so badly that blind ambition guided my decision making more so than logic. We applied for permits about three weeks before our trip, but never expected to get them on such short notice. Based on National Park Service data, fewer than 200 people hike Nankoweap annually, partially because extreme weather and remoteness limit the trail’s accessibility to a couple of months in Spring and Fall, but also because there are only two very small areas with enough flat space for a tent between the trailhead and the bottom of the Canyon. The trail descends 11 rugged miles from the Nankoweap trailhead at the park boundary (1,000 vertical feet below the North Rim) to the Colorado River, but accessing the official trailhead requires a strenuous hike from one of two adjacent trails, each over 3 miles in length. Add the return distance, and the total mileage for this hike includes 28 grueling miles from rim to river and back, at minimum. This brings me to the first of many mistakes, which was assuming we’d be able to cover this distance in only two days. Mathematically, 14 miles (one way) in 12 daylight hours sounds perfectly reasonable for two tenured hikers, right? Wrong. There’s no amount of backpacking experience anywhere else that equates to backpacking experience below the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Because NPS issues such a small number of permits for Nankoweap, Megan and I were shocked to learn that our request had been approved. I’m grateful that she trusted my judgment as we planned this adventure, but I still carry a lot of guilt for leading my best friend into a dangerous situation that we weren’t prepared for. I must have read NPS’s guide to Nankoweap a dozen times before our visit, but I misinterpreted one very critical detail that I’ve only come to realize in the aftermath of our emergence from the Grand Canyon. The guide says, “The majority of hikers take two days to complete the journey, spending the night on the way down at either Marion Point or Tilted Mesa”. I thought “two days to complete the journey” meant two days total, but in hindsight, I should have paid more attention to the second part of the sentence and understood that most hikers actually take two days to go down AND an additional two days to come back up.

Aside from NPS’s two-page overview, there’s just not much reliable information available about Nankoweap. Almost every other source subjectively recounts the experience of someone qualified to hike this trail, and it’s really difficult to put this into perspective unless the author explicitly states their prerequisites. Admittedly, I should have been more discerning. I relied heavily on personal blogs and social media to connect with a small handful of others who hiked this trail within the past few years. I’m the only person I can hold accountable for trusting the guidance I received, because it’s not anyone else’s responsibility to understand my qualifications when offering advice about their experience, on Nankoweap or any other trail.

Megan and I approached the trailhead from the west, via FR 610. We chose this approach simply because it was the closest one from the direction we were traveling from. We began our descent into the Grand Canyon shortly after dawn, which (as we know now) is not early enough for hikers attempting to reach Nankoweap Creek in a single day. The 3-mile approach to the Nankoweap trailhead at the park boundary, along the Saddle Mountain trail, was much more strenuous and slow than either of us expected. It’s narrow, brushy, and never flat. The trail ascends and descends constantly. By the time we reached the Nankoweap trailhead, we were already behind our intended schedule, but optimistic that we still had plenty of daylight hours between us and a luscious creekside campsite, about 9 miles from our current location and 12 miles from our starting point on the North Rim. I should also add that despite the unforgiving terrain along the Saddle Mountain trail, the sunrise vistas across the Grand Canyon were infinitely beautiful, and Megan and I hiked onward like moths drawn to Nankoweap’s illustrious flame.

We’d read about the importance of caching water on the descent, and we approached the trail with a well-intended but ultimately dangerous plan for this. We each carried 4 liters of water in our backpacks, with the mentality that we’d be able to move quickly over Nankoweap’s brutal terrain with a lighter load. To put this into perspective, NPS recommends drinking at least 4 to 6 liters of water per day when hiking below the rim. That’s a general recommendation that doesn’t take weather, distance, or trail difficulty into consideration. We planned to cache two liters of water at Marion Point (5 trail miles and 2,700 vertical feet below our starting point) and another liter at Tilted Mesa (8 trail miles and 3,300 vertical feet below our starting point). This plan provided us with 5 total liters of water to split on the way down to Nankoweap Creek (12 trail miles and 6,000 vertical feet below our starting point), where we’d have access to as much water as our thirsty hearts desired. There are no reliable water sources above Nankoweap Creek, and in all of our planning, we never considered the possibility that we may not be able to reach this critical water source before nightfall. This failure to have a contingency plan actually could have killed us, and reliving our thought process as I’m writing these words fills me with conflicting emotions of self loathing over my own stupidity and overwhelming relief that our situation wasn’t worse than it could have been.

We arrived at Tilted Mesa around noon, already exhausted and not nearly as far along the trail as we thought we’d be when the midday heat reached its peak. As planned, we’d cached two liters of water at Marion Point, under a bush where we discovered another water cache left by hikers that we assumed were further down the trail than we were. Several factors influenced our next decision, and for the sake of keeping this already lengthy blog post from evolving into a full-blown novel, I have to sacrifice some details that factored into that decision. By the time we reached Tilted Mesa, we’d already realized that we were in over our heads and needed to adapt. Hiking to the Colorado River (6 trail miles and 2,800 vertical feet below Tilted Mesa) no longer seemed like a realistic option, considering our remaining daylight hours and already anticipating the arduous climb out of the canyon the following day. We decided to ditch our overnight packs and carry our day packs down to Nankoweap Creek (4 trail miles and 2,100 feet below Tilted Mesa), replenish our water supply, and hike back up to Tilted Mesa to camp before returning to the rim the following day. We thought we’d be able to move faster with lighter packs. We did not consider the impact of hiking in 100+ degree heat, with a diminishing water supply and absolutely no shade. We’d both hiked through extreme heat in the South, but dry desert heat hits different than steamy Tennessee heat. The elevation change over the distance we’d need to traverse on our descent to the creek seemed manageable, but once again, we underestimated the environment we were hiking through. The trail is loose, gravelly, and thoroughly exposed to the sun.

After hiking no more than 2 miles from Tilted Mesa toward Nankoweap Creek, we came to the grim realization that we wouldn’t be able to reach the creek, retrieve and filter water, AND make it back up to our camping gear at Tilted Mesa before nightfall. We knew that in our quickly deteriorating condition, we’d struggle to climb back up to Tilted Mesa with heavier packs after replenishing our water supply. Also, we only had the capacity to carry 5 liters, since we’d cached 2 liters at Marion Point and left one at Tilted Mesa when we started the hike down to the creek. In hindsight, I don’t think that this would have been enough anyways, even if we’d set aside the time to drink water beside the creek and rest before heading back up with our load. By hiking as far as we did in our attempt to reach the creek, we burned valuable energy and lost more fluid than we realized as we sweat in the scorching afternoon heat. Sweat tends to linger and drip in the thick humidity of my beloved wild places at home in Tennessee, but in the dry heat of the desert, sweat evaporates into the air soon after our skin releases it. Because our bodies use sweat as a cooling mechanism, we produce more of it in dry climates than in humid ones, even though we don’t notice it as much. Megan and I took small, infrequent sips of water and rested often as we returned to Tilted Mesa, feeling utterly beaten and very apprehensive about the next day’s ascent with a nearly depleted water supply.

After a monstrous struggle with our tent, we established camp for the night with about an hour to spare before sunset. For the first time since our descent into the Grand Canyon, we had nothing to focus our attention on besides the impeccable beauty of our surroundings. We consciously decided that despite our circumstances, we needed a moment of joy. We needed something wholly positive that we could carry into the night and the difficult day ahead of us. I have never seen anything, on any hike, as breathlessly magnificent as the views from our campsite at Tilted Mesa. We didn’t know how we’d find the strength or energy to hike out of the canyon, but in that golden hour, Tilted Mesa numbed every fear and hopeless thought. I don’t say that lightly. I mean it. Megan and I were immersed in one of the world’s most stunning landscapes, miles and miles from evidence that any other humans existed, and dehydration could never take that feeling away from us. Aside from the incomparable beauty of this place, I remember the quiet. I’m still in awe of the pure and invigorating noiselessness of Tilted Mesa, and this silence somehow amplified the visual impact of our surroundings. In Tennessee and every other place where I’ve hiked, human footprints barely make a discernible sound above the noise that’s already there, between wind and wildlife and water. I never thought about noise on a trail until I hiked through its delightfully eerie absence on Nankoweap.

By the time we woke up on the following day, our mouths were too dry to swallow food. Although we’d failed to carry enough water, we did carry the right types and quantity of food. We had plenty of salted nuts, beef jerky, dried fruit, granola bars, and an assortment of additional snacks suitable for hiking below the rim. In the Grand Canyon, these snacks are useless unless accompanied by water. I distinctly remember waking up before sunrise and nearly choking on a bite of almond butter because it stuck in my throat when I tried to swallow it, blocking my trachea until I reached my hand in to pull it out. We drank the last remaining drops of our water and held onto the hope that the 2 liters we’d cached at Marion point would be enough to carry us out of the Grand Canyon. 3 trail miles existed between us and this water, which may not seem like much, but there are no easy miles on Nankoweap. The stretch between Marion Point and Tilted Mesa is precariously narrow and uneven, with sections of trail that require hiking within a couple of inches of 100+ foot drop-offs into the canyon below. There’s no margin for error here, and in addition to dehydration, we were starting to feel the dizzying impact of hunger and low electrolytes too. I cannot properly describe the agony of hunger when there’s food within reach that you can’t eat because your body can’t produce any saliva.

Megan was hiking slightly ahead of me, and when I reached Marion Point, I thought she’d be there waiting, but she wasn’t. I shouted her name into the canyon and heard no reply. Honestly, this was the most terrifying part of the journey for me. I thought she’d fainted from thirst or hunger or heat, and I scrambled upward in pure panic mode to get a better view of the trail ahead. I had the water canister in my hand, and I could see that it was full, so I knew she must have passed it without realizing it and continued on, thinking she’d find it later. I ventured to the edge of the point and screamed as loud as my exhausted lungs would allow, and I heard a faint confirmation from Megan that she was OK, fifty or so yards ahead and around a curve in the trail. She’d overlooked the water cache initially and came back to Marion Point to meet me. I still hadn’t taken a sip of the water, because I thought we should make a joint decision about how to proceed.

The other water cache we’d passed on the way down was still there, the one left by hikers we assumed were now deeper in the canyon than we’d descended on the previous day. This 3 liter cache rested only a few inches from ours and probably would have provided the supplemental hydration we’d need to hike out of the canyon from Marion Point. Without even discussing it, we both knew that this water was not ours to take. As dire as our circumstances were, we couldn’t force anything similar on somebody else, especially somebody who’d planned appropriately. We drank most of the water from our cache, saving about a half liter for the remainder of the journey. Megan’s body was responding to dehydration more productively than mine was, so we agreed that she should take our remaining water and hike onward. We’d read about a seasonal spring close to the Nankoweap trailhead at the park boundary, two miles ahead of us, so Megan planned to search for it and bring water back to me if there was any available.

We remembered having a very weak but present cell signal somewhere between Marion Point and the Nankoweap trailhead at the park boundary. We wouldn’t have separated without this realization that either of us could call for help if absolutely necessary. I was hiking with a GPS, but it was only equipped to provide maps and location tracking and could not send an emergency signal, so we needed cell service in order to request help. A few minutes after Megan left, I became nauseous and vomited every sip of water I’d just consumed onto a defenseless cactus beside the trail. For a brief moment, I couldn’t see. Dark spots dominated my vision, and my arms flailed in reach of something to grab onto before collapsing and potentially falling into the canyon. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I came close enough to realize that I couldn’t continue to traverse this exposed ridge in my current condition. I hiked and crawled along the trail, grabbing anything I could for support and vomiting one more time along the way, until I found a cell signal. I tried to call Megan, but I wasn’t surprised when the call went straight to voicemail, because by that time she would have already passed the area with cell service. I called my husband, hysterical and incoherent, and asked him to call Megan. Andy wasn’t able to reach Megan either, so before I hiked beyond the area with a cell signal, I called Grand Canyon Emergency Services, a number I’d saved in my phone before our trip but never thought I’d actually need.

I spoke with a Park Ranger named Shane, sobbing but too dehydrated to produce actual tears, and I remember a genuine kindness and concern in his voice that I won’t ever forget. Initially, there weren’t any Park Rangers available to come to our aid, but Shane said he’d keep working on it and would stay in touch to make sure I was OK. I trusted him but also faced the terrifying possibility of spending another night below the rim, without water or shelter (Megan had the tent in her backpack) or confirmation that Megan was OK. Shane called again thirty minutes later and told me that he’d dispatched rangers to come to our aid, but I didn’t ask how long it’d take for them to reach us because I was afraid of the response. There’s not an NPS ranger station anywhere close to the Saddle Mountain Overlook, where Megan and I started our hike, and the Rangers would have to hike down 4 miles and 2,000 vertical feet from there to reach my location.

I crawled underneath a small tree beside the trail and instantly, but unintentionally, fell asleep. An hour later, I awoke to the sound of voices, but these weren’t the voices of Park Rangers. The voices belonged to the same hikers who’d cached the water that we saw at Marion Point, and after assessing my condition, they offered me some of this water, which they didn’t need because they’d carried more than enough with them on a 4-day excursion from rim to river and back on Nankoweap, which explains why we never saw them. If this isn’t proof of karma, I don’t know what is. Megan and I didn’t even consider drinking the water when we found it cached along the trail, because it felt wrong, regardless of our circumstances. However, when the owners of this water found me in a depleted state, they shared it without hesitation. They didn’t have to do it. I’d told them that the Rangers were on their way. I learned that their names were Chris and Sean, and that they lived in Sedona. Chris and Sean each had years of backpacking experience below the rim and had hiked many different trails in the canyon, but this was their first time on Nankoweap. They stayed with me until I felt well enough to hike to the park boundary, where it’d be easier for the Park Rangers to reach and treat me. When I was ready, we hiked to the park boundary together, and they didn’t leave me until the Park Rangers arrived. Over the course of two days on Nankoweap, Chris and Sean are the only hikers I saw beyond the park boundary, besides Megan of course, and honestly, hardly a day has passed since when I haven’t thought about their compassion.

Despite all the hiking I’ve done over the years, I’ve had very few interactions with Park Rangers, aside from brief conversations via phone or at a ranger station to ask about trail conditions or routes. I’d certainly never needed their help in an emergency situation. I often think about the distance that these Grand Canyon Park Rangers traveled, by road and by trail, to reach Megan and me because I’d failed to plan appropriately, and the fact that park resources are so limited. Honestly, I just didn’t think I deserved their help and wasn’t ready to confront all of my mistakes on Nankoweap while the wounds were still so fresh. I felt like a child who’d been sent to the principal’s office, except what I’d done was so terrible that the principal was coming to me instead. I felt slightly rejuvenated after drinking the water that Chris and Sean graciously shared with me, but still far from well enough to complete the ascent from the park boundary to our camper van at Saddle Mountain Overlook. I needed these Park Rangers, but I dreaded the interaction. I expected a well-deserved lecture about Nankoweap’s dangers and the fates of hikers who haven’t survived mistakes similar to mine when hiking this trail. I already felt so entirely defeated, physically and mentally, and aside from asking about Megan, I struggled to say anything at all to the Park Rangers when they reached me. They confirmed that Megan was OK and reached Saddle Mountain Overlook shortly before they did, and that the spring she’d searched for was currently dry. She’d hiked onward, thinking that she may find help on the Saddle Mountain trail or that if she made it back to the van, she could rehydrate and bring water down to me.

My anxiety about the Park Rangers, whose names were Tim and Jesse, quickly diminished after I actually met them. They demonstrated so much empathy and reassurance, and time passed quickly as they provided the medical attention I needed and fed me water and snacks that they’d carried down the trail in their backpacks. I told them everything about mine and Megan’s Nankoweap journey, and how we rationalized the poor decisions we made both before and during our experience on the trail. I didn’t tell them because they asked for an explanation, but because they listened. If they had any resentful or patronizing thoughts, which would have been completely valid, they didn’t express them. I’m sure it was nothing more than professional courtesy for two Park Rangers with extensive search and rescue experience, but from my extremely vulnerable position, their kindness felt personal and genuine. We talked about their jobs and adventures within the Grand Canyon and beyond. I learned that Jesse grew up close to Nashville and had hiked many of the same trails that I’ve explored in Tennessee. He also attended the University of Tennessee at the same time as my husband, although they didn’t know each other.

After allowing plenty of time for me to rest and ensuring that I felt strong enough to hike out to the trailhead under my own power, we began the ascent toward the Saddle Mountain Overlook. They stayed with me the entire time and allowed me to set the pace and stop for breaks as needed. We reached the trailhead before sunset, and despite my immense relief that the journey was over, I felt so much regret about how it ended. The pain and the mistakes loom large over an otherwise extraordinary adventure through an entirely magnificent part of the Grand Canyon that so few people ever get to see. Also, I’m grateful to have met the people who helped me on Nankoweap. Chris and Sean reminded me of the powerful and lasting impact that a small act of kindness can have on a stranger. I’ve also immortalized Shane, Tim, and Jesse for their incredible capacity for balancing heroism and compassion on a daily basis. It’s unlikely that I’ll cross paths with any of them again, but for the rest of my life, I will always remember the names of these incredible people and hope that someday I’m able to pass the good will that they’ve inspired in me onto someone else who needs it.

We hadn’t even left the state of Arizona before Megan and I decided that we would return to Nankoweap one day, after we have enough backpacking experience on other trails below the rim of the Grand Canyon. We’ll approach it with more careful preparation and humility, but I have no doubt that even if we were to hike this trail a hundred times, it’d still find new ways to surprise and challenge us. That’s part of the allure. This trail nearly killed me, but I fell in love with it anyways. Years will likely pass before my to return to Nankoweap, but when the day inevitably comes, I’ll be ready.