Rim to Rim
A Traverse of the Grand Canyon
by Angela Megarry
On foot 25 miles, by road 215; this was the choice of the group at the end of a holiday walking in the ‘Canyonlands’ of south west USA. Arches. Bryce and Zion National Parks deserve their world wide reputation for their stunning and varied beauty. All are part of the Colorado Plateau where multi-hued strata of sedimentary rocks were uplifted at the time of the building of the Rockies about 70 million years ago, but remained virtually horizontal. So a multi-coloured ‘layer cake’ has been exposed to water and wind erosion, giving fantastic landforms, nowhere more famously than in Monument Valley.
The Colorado River has cut into this Plateau at an amazing rate. Geologists estimate that it has only taken about 5 million years to create the 277 mile long and over a mile deep Grand Canyon. The river system is thought to remove 10,000 tons of rock per day! All the tributaries have trenched down too, creating the familiar and magnificent landscape.
It is one thing to view from the edge at dawn or sunset, walk the level rim trails, trek down a little as practice but a traverse taking 2 days is a quite different venture with a whole day of descent and an even longer day’s climb up. Warning notices and sad stories beside them add to the tension.
We set off from South Rim at dawn down ‘Bright Angel Trail’. Mist was rising and the landscape was gradually diffused with gold. Our progress was marked by different rock bands, limestone and sandstone cliffs, shale and mudstone slopes, grey, green, gold, pink and red. The bedding planes between the strata were clearly visible l straight and flat.
The trails are excellent paths, constructed in the 1930s in Roosevelt’s New Deal employment drive and well maintained by young and enthusiastic rangers. Although often etched into sheer cliff faces they are wide enough for walkers to stand inside while a mule train passes on the outer edge. As well as a good safe path there are several stops with piped drinking water, chemical loos and backpack campsites hidden amid bushes and trees.
The Colorado River itself is hardly visible from the rim and neither is the Inner Canyon, for about 2/3rds of the way down the ‘layer cake’ is replaced by ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks, schist, gneiss and granite forming an inner, narrower gorge. These contorted rocks in pink, green and purple are adorned by quartz veins and sparkling mica and at 1800 million years old are half the age of the earth. Their sheer faces are awesome and their colours vivid but even their resistance and antiquity has failed to impede the down cutting Colorado. Another unexpected aspect of the Inner Canyon is that water percolating through the sedimentary layers above is forced to the surface at the junction with the impermeable, ancient rocks underneath, so waterfalls and torrents abound, all plunging down to the main river.
One hears the river before seeing it, a mighty roar. It is brown, rushing and turbulent, due to rocks in its 100’ deep bed. A lunch time picnic was taken on a sandy beach, fringed by tamarisk, with a brief, cold paddle, certainly no swimming! Then the trail, blasted into a sheer cliff face, leads up river, eastward for a mile to a 400’ long suspension bridge. There are very few places in its length where the canyon allows any sort of path along its banks. We walked through lush riverine woodland to Phantom Ranch, a rustic collection of log cabins with ‘mountain hut facilities’, which originates from the 1920s.
We started up the even longer ascent of the North Kaibab trail while it was still dark and starlit. The geology repeated itself exactly in reverse, oldest to youngest. Our gradual progress was marked by the familiar colour scheme. ‘Once we are past the bright red sandstone we are nearly there’. Members of the group who had taken the 215 mile option greeted us at North rim as if we had run a marathon! We walkers all arrived within a two hour span.
Many may decry a group walking holiday, preferring own initiatives or ventures with friends but the logistics of rim to rim are difficult and Phantom Ranch, of limited capacity, requires reservations long in advance. However accomplished, the sheer exhilaration and beauty of a world class walk, closely experiencing earth’s history* are to be recommended.
*A walk from rim to rim is the geological equivalent of a journey from the Cotswolds to the Outer Hebrides and back.
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Last updated 18 June 2008