Day 27: Bright Angel - Passport Diaries

The whole family hiked down to the first switchback on the Bright Angel Trail for our last day at the Grand Canyon. Eloise soon fell asleep and her little baby snores set the pace. Here’s a shock for everyone: Eloise was the youngest person we saw on the trail. Although, in all fairness, we were not on the trail very long at all.

This very trail figures prominently (not really) in my family history. In the early 1970s, my parents joined my dad’s older brother and his college friends for a late-December hike overnight in the Grand Canyon.

“But isn’t snow in the forecast?” wondered my mom.

“Oh, it NEVER snows at the bottom of the Grand Canyon,” said one of the wise college boys.

So off they went. They hiked down to the bottom, crossed the river, and hiked halfway up the North Rim before setting up camp.

The next morning dawned cold and…SNOWY. A ranger came by as they packed up camp. It’ll be snowing for days, he told them. Get out now!

So instead of continuing up the north side, they rerouted back the way they came, climbing back up Bright Angel. It was cold. So cold they couldn’t eat their now frozen food when they stopped for lunch. My mom started to cry. What idiot said it never snowed at the bottom of the Grand Canyon?!

It was getting dark when they made it back to the South Rim, where they found two feet of snow and temperatures around 20 degrees. And—because this was the early 70s when gas was scare? expensive? both?—all the gas had been siphoned out of their car! Stolen! An hour or so later they were gassed up and on their way home to SoCal.

So “it never snows at the bottom of the Grand Canyon” is one of those taglines that crops up every now and then.

“Look out for MULE POOP!” Isaac announced to everyone on the hike.

“I don’t want to turn around yet! I want to keep going!” Isaac complained when we told him we were about to turn around.

“I’m tired of walking!” Isaac said five seconds later, before we’d even gotten to the turn around.

“I’m hot! I don’t like walking!” he whined on the way back up.

Tonight I texted my hip parents about our family vacation’s slightly longer hike along the Bright Angel Trail 16 years ago.

“You were at a different stage of life then,” my dad said: “The whiny complaining stage. But look at you now—perpetuating the misery on your own kids!”

After our morning hike, I completed the National Park Passport Grand Canyon stamps at Kolb Studio. Then we had a very nice lunch at the Arizona Room until the kids started throwing broccoli at each other through their chair backs and we had to leave. Still TWO HOURS to kill before the train boarded.

So we walked over and saw the famous Grand Canyon mules. Each one goes to the bottom of the canyon once every third day, we learned. A cowboy brought one over for the kids to pet and it mule-hugged Isaac. Other mules rolled around in the dirt, and it all smelled very Wild West and mule-y. That was great fun.

The rest of our day was spent eating ice cream on the rim and pretending the telescopes were guns for shooting flags and birds.

On the train ride back, gasp! Bandits rode up alongside and boarded the train!! Yikes! I’d given the kids money to give the bandits, but when I said, “Please! Don’t hurt my baby!” and told Eloise to hand over her dollar she stole it back! The poor bandit wasn’t sure what to do, so I tried to get her to give it back to him. “Nooooo!” she wailed. “Great, I’m going to have nightmares about robbing kids tonight,” said the bandit. Isaac kept his dollar (“if I gave it to them, they were gonna KEEP it!”) and opted instead to give it to the kind hostess of our train car.

The most excited I saw the kids the entire Grand Canyon vacation was over getting to operate the soft-serve ice cream dispenser at dinner.

“Isaac, what was your favorite part of the trip?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

“The mountains over the river,” came his immediate reply. The helicopter ride. Oh thank goodness.

So I guess all the ice cream is just bonus!