We’re hiking the Grand Canyon in November! I am super excited and more than a little bit worried. The plan is to hike down the South Kaibab Trail (7.4 miles from the South Kaibab Trailhead to Phantom Ranch). Spend one night in the Phantom Ranch hiker dormitories. And then hike back up the Bright Angel Trail (9.9 miles from Phantom Ranch to the top).
The miles in and out aren’t the scary part. We’ve been working on that as a family and can now do back-to-back 6-mile hikes easily. As long as we keep upping the mileage on our family shakedown hikes and clearing schedules to make time for hiking, we’ll be fine.
The elevation change is what worries me. The hike down the South Kaibab Trail will be an elevation change of about 4,700 feet and the hike up the Bright Angel Trail will be an elevation change of about 4,400 feet. So I’ve been practicing that too. We live near the Konza Research Prairie with some of the best hiking trails in the area. Each of the Konza trails is a loop that starts with a hike up a very big hill. And I’ve done the math. If I can make it up and down that hill 20 times easily, I can hike myself out of the Grand Canyon. Or if I can climb 400 sets of stairs, I can hike myself out of the Grand Canyon. (It really is a very big hill.)
I’ll be honest here. It doesn’t look like much in my pictures. But that hill used to kick my ass. Every time. I’d get to the top gasping and wheezing. Every time. I used to wonder if I was going to pass out at the top of that hill. Every time. But I said we’d been working on it and we have. The husband and boys gifted me a Fitbit last year for my birthday. As of today I have logged 2,938,304 steps on it. That translates to just over 1,245 miles for me. And a good chunk of those steps have been up that Konza hill. That helps. Also, it turns out I have exercise-induced asthma so an inhaler helps. And trekking poles are awesome help with the uphill climbs!
Also FYI: It took 300ish calls (dial, hang up on busy signal, redial immediately) for hours to get through to reservations. And you need to plan a whole year in advance since they open reservations of the month you want at 7 am Mountain Time on the 1st of the month a year ahead of time. I think I got 4 of the last dorm slots available for the entire month of November 2017 when our call finally went through at 9 am CST on November 1, 2016. And we did have to be flexible – cabins were already gone so the husband and boys will stay in the men’s dorm and I’ll stay in the women’s dorm. We only got one night instead of the two we wanted. And we had to take the date available instead of the one we wanted.
