I hiked into Arizona's Grand Canyon—here's what it was like

One-armed, lavishly bearded and as tough as bedrock, John Wesley Powell was the leader of the first river passage through the Grand Canyon. The geologist and explorer wrote extensively about his expedition in 1869, concluding: ‘You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted. To see it, you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths.’

It’s in this spirit — if not quite this timeframe — that I arrive in Arizona’s foremost national park. I’m hiking the Escalante Route: a four-day circuit that snakes all the way down to the banks of the mighty Colorado River from the South Rim, the entry point to the canyon for the vast majority of visitors. Ten miles of river frontage are traced before the route joins up with the fabled Grandview Trail for the ascent back up to rim level. It’s a 35-mile backcountry beauty, tackled by a tiny fraction of the millions who converge on the Grand Canyon each year, and I can’t wait to get started.

First, however, I have a small problem. “Awkward question,” I say, smiling at the park official sheepishly. “But where exactly is the canyon?” She looks at me sympathetically. Clearly I’m not the first visitor to misplace one of the largest landforms on Earth. The issue is one of sight lines. The Colorado Plateau — elevated by tectonic forces long before the Colorado River and its attendant tributaries reached for their chisels — is unerringly flat and coated with pine and juniper forest. Which means a chasm measuring nearly 280 miles long, 10 miles across and a mile deep can be concealed with little more foliage than you’d need to mask an unsightly shed.

The pay-off, of course, is the big reveal. The canyon is very much a work in progress, with the residual rock sculpted into a maze as sprawling and intricate as a metropolis. Pinnacles and spires soar skywards. Muscular, sheer-walled escarpments fall away to gorges shrouded in shadow. Isolated buttes fan out at their base like extravagant ball gowns.

‘Unfathomable’ is an overused adjective these days, but, to the Spanish conquistadors who arrived at the South Rim in 1540 — the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon — it was apt. Humiliatingly so. Guided by members of the Native American Hopi tribe, García López de Cárdenas and his men were taken to the chasm edge, where they attempted to process what they were surveying.

The river they could just make out on the canyon floor was around 6ft across, they estimated. The boulders lining its path? Likely no bigger than a man. “Nip down and take a look would you?” was the gist of the order Cárdenas gave to his men. And for three fruitless days they tried, scrambling around the canyon’s walls and barely penetrating its craggy immensity. Eventually they returned, exhausted. The river, they reported, was in fact wider than Iberia’s Tagus, and those man-sized boulders ‘higher than the great tower of Seville’. The Grand Canyon would remain unbreached by Europeans for a further two centuries.

It’s close to the spot at which Cárdenas and his men made their erroneous estimations that my hike begins. Here, some 25 miles east of the busy viewpoints accessed from the rim-edge Grand Canyon Village, and more than 100 miles from the glass-bottomed Skywalk bridge, it’s eerily quiet. Far below, I can see the dusty blue-sliver of the Colorado approach from the north and swing theatrically west.

Leading our little expedition is Braxton Adams, a Utah-based adventurer who exudes the two things you want most in a guide: competence and personality. The dapper moustache is merely a bonus. The third member of our group is John, a 62-year-old outdoor enthusiast from the city of Flagstaff, a 90-minute drive south. We do our last checks of camping gear and provisions and pull on our packs. “All set?” asks Braxton, smiling brightly. We nod, tap trekking poles and step over the threshold.

Time travel

Incongruously, it was the wild-eyed prospectors of the late 19th century who paved the way for mainstream exploration of the Grand Canyon. Drawn by tales of bountiful gold, silver and copper, they set about the tortuously slow, consistently hazardous process of carving, laying and often blasting trails out of the upper canyon walls to hoped-for mining claims.

Modest amounts of precious metals would indeed be found, but never in sufficient quantities to offset the burden of extracting and hauling them out. An easier income could be garnered from servicing the growing appetite among well-heeled visitors to venture into the inner canyon for leisure.

It’s one of these former mining trails, the Tanner, that serves as the opening stretch of the Escalante Route. It’s nine miles to our first planned camping spot on the sandy south shore of the river, with a drop of around 4,500ft. In summer, this largely exposed trail is notorious for its incinerating temperatures, but in the soft sunshine of early spring, the conditions are perfect: 14C or 15C, a light breeze and cloudless skies.

We admire the cascading vines of the roundleaf buffaloberry, thought to be named for the sauce that early settlers made from the shrub’s berries to accompany buffalo meat. Equally striking is the squat white sage. “Here, smell the leaves,” says Braxton, rubbing them between his fingers and offering up his hand. A smoky, pleasantly herbal aroma fills my nostrils. He smiles. “Back in the day, men used to rub this on their necks after a long day on the trail. They called it ‘cowboy cologne’.”

The trail is rocky and unmaintained but in decent nick. As we descend, the thrilling nuance of the landscape begins to emerge. At times it takes on the uniform of a Montana prairie, with golden grasses swaying in the breeze; at others, the sparse, desiccated shroud of an ancient, abandoned quarry.

Off to our right is the grandly named Palisades of the Desert — the imposing eastern escarpment of the canyon. Long before this landscape was forced upwards by tectonic activity and downcut by the Colorado, the entire region lay at the bottom of nutrient-rich tropical seas.

The product of tens of millions of years of sequential deposition is vividly displayed on the canyon walls, with each horizontal band as discrete and uniform as a child’s layered sand jar. Every step down spans a million years, give or take. Reach the bottom, place your hand on the immovable schist that arrested the river’s erosive progress and you’ll be touching rock nearly half as old as Earth itself. ‘Perhaps it is not the size nor the huge witchery of changing shapes and shades that fills us with awe,’ wrote English novelist JB Priestley, upon visiting the canyon in the 1930s, ‘but the obscure feeling that here we have an instantaneous vision of innumerable eons.’

We reach our targeted riverside spot in the late afternoon, strip down to our undershorts and plunge in — taking care to remain close to the bank. What had seemed a placid waterway for much of our approach reveals itself, at eye level, to be an intimidating torrent.

Nearly 250,000sq miles of the American Southwest are drained by the Colorado. Standing on its banks, it’s not hard to imagine the river — swollen by glacier melt and using boulders and rocks as crude instruments of erosion — slicing its way down through the layers of soft sedimentary rock like a buzzsaw.

We scout around for a spot where we can erect our tents and settle on a raised clearing just back from the water. We each choose a corner, finesse our respective shelters into life then gather around our foldaway stoves to cook dinner: a wilderness-sweetened feast of boil-in-the-bag chicken pad thai, strips of dried mango, and mussels in lemon-herb sauce on crackers. Braxton, who’s sourced most of the provisions — carefully balancing calories with palatability — is the toast of the camp. We filter river water to top up our flasks, stow our gear and, to the soporific thunder of the surging Colorado, fall asleep beneath a vast dome of stars.

Hunter-gatherers

On multi-day hikes, rhythms are quickly established and days have a tendency to segue into one another. Not here. Every half-hour or so, a markedly different view, landscape or challenge is presented. Sometimes it’s weaving through riverside thickets of head-high tamarisk shrubs, accompanied by the metallic chirp of the charismatic canyon wren. Then, perhaps, a scramble up an iridescent rock ledge, or the careful descent of a scree-filled runnel. I grow fond of the golden-orange halos of the pathside prickly pear cactuses as the sunlight catches their tiny, barbed spines; and the striking yellow tentacled flowers of the brittlebushes, which cluster like paparazzi around gullies, eagerly awaiting the fleeting appearance of rain.

Such is the peripheral jumble of gullies, ridges and canyons within canyons, riverside progress is slow. On the afternoon of the second day, we venture more than a mile ‘inland’, drop down into the head of a slot canyon many times as high as it is wide and crunch along its pebble-strewn sandy floor all the way back round to the mouth. Our aggregate riverine progress for this hour of thrilling exertion is just a few hundred yards.

A rain shower the next morning sends us scuttling towards the nearest rockface, where we discover a neat overhang. Loose stones have been stacked in a bow-shaped wall, forming a crude habitation. Laid out meticulously on a flat slab beneath the fire-blackened base of the overhang are sharpened fragments of flint-like red and black rock — perhaps the chert or obsidian with which the Native American hunter-gatherers who roamed these parts for nearly 12 millennia furnished their projectiles. I’m surprised to see such valuable archaeological items unclaimed. “It’s just good practice,” says Braxton, with a shrug. “Anything that you find in the canyon must remain here.”

The river accompanies us like an outrider for much of day three. It’s a constant presence, even when out of sight. Since Powell’s rowboat expedition, river rafting (or ‘running’, as it’s known here) has become hugely popular, with those tackling the full length of the Grand Canyon facing no fewer than 160 rapids. Arguably the most challenging of these is Hance Rapid, which drops 30ft over a tumultuous quarter of a mile or so. It’s in a sand-fringed natural pool just upstream from this that we take our final swim of the trek, as the sun flirts with the horizon. From this spot, just nine or so miles of the Escalante Route remain. But it’s all, to varying degrees, upwards — threaded through a landscape as dramatic as any so far encountered.

When Victorian biologist Clinton Hart Merriam conducted studies of the canyon in the late 1880s, he concluded that hiking from the river to the rim was climatically akin to journeying from the Mexican deserts to the Canadian Rockies. Yet, between those two extremes, as we begin our climb in the embers of the penultimate day, I discover echoes of places I’ve known: from the towering, cloud-snagged peaks of the central Alps to the tawny, scree-streaked slopes of the Highlands.

We ascend for around an hour, then set up our final camp on a little plateau along the ancillary canyon of Hance Creek. Until now, provisions have been carefully eked out. With the end in sight, culinary frugality is dispensed with and we gorge on coconut curry, butternut dhal bhat, strips of beef jerky — anything that still remains in the recesses of our packs.

As we’re nursing our post-prandial coffees, Braxton points out the distinctive peak of Vishnu Temple, glowing defiantly above the encircling shadows. At 7,533ft, it’s one of the largest freestanding summits of the canyon, rising from the jumble of buttes and mesas across the chasm — a neat, tiered pyramid that does indeed resemble something sacred, something man-made. “This place just never stops surprising you,” says John, shaking his head in awe. A silent concurrence hangs over the camp. At length, we retreat to our tents and are asleep before our heads hit the blow-up pillows.

White out

We wake refreshed, pack up camp with a practised efficiency and tick off the first couple of miles before breakfast with gusto, in temperatures that have us shedding layers. But by the time we reach the Hance Creek camping area, around five miles from the rim, there’s a whisper of drizzle in the air and it’s perceptibly cooler. Such camping areas — spartan, permit-only and dramatically situated — are a feature of the half dozen or so trails staggered along the South Rim, each offering manageable tasters of the backcountry Grand Canyon experience.

A stay at Hance Creek, with its dried riverbed setting shaded by vivid-green cottonwood trees, is highly prized. A whiff of coffee on the breeze and some carefree chatter herald the presence of a small group. We greet them from afar with waves; it feels odd to be sharing the landscape with others again, even one as expansive as this.

What follows are some of the steepest and most historically resonant miles of the circuit. Near the intersection of the New Hance Trail and the Grandview, we pass remnants of the Last Chance copper mine which, perhaps wary of the name, thrived for a decade at the turn of the last century. Alongside an abandoned mine shaft is a rusted contraption for crushing ore, the remains of some rudimentary transport carts and gushing torrents of loose rock spilling down the slope. It’s an exposed, wind-whipped spot — eerily silent, richly atmospheric. I find myself picturing the wretched souls who laboured here day after day, no doubt cursing the cruel collusion of unyielding rock and unrelenting gradient.

The snow, when it starts, is wispy and unconvincing, like something from the set of a budget romcom. But as we continue to climb, the flakes grow thicker and more plentiful, blanketing the rocks and precariously perched junipers of the upper canyon slopes with surprising ease. We dig out gloves and hats and press on up the hairpin bends of the Grandview Trail, feeling oddly privileged to experience such canyon extremes.

Up ahead, a lone figure appears, walking down the path towards us. She wears waterproofs and a National Park Service cap. Beneath its dark, snow-dusted brim is the broad smile of someone in her element. This is Danielle Urich, a hydrologist on her way into the canyon on one of her regular multi-day trips. Her role is to monitor and measure water flows and hydrological activity, she explains, and she often ventures deep into the maze of caves and fractures that connect the rim-level sinkholes with the canyon-floor springs.

Some of the things she’s seen have left her speechless, she confesses. “There are some caves a hundred feet tall with a river running through them. It’s so beautiful.” The Flagstaff-based 27-year-old has worked in the canyon for nearly three years and loves the stillness and seclusion. “Once you get away from the rim and the major trails, it’s so easy to find solitude,” she enthuses. After bidding us farewell, she is quickly swallowed up by the enveloping whiteness.

We’ve parked a provisions-laden vehicle in the small car park at the Grandview trailhead. The thought of it sustains us through the final mile, during which the shin-deep accumulation of snow on the steepening path slows our pace to a laboured shuffle. Merriman’s assertion that an ascent of the Canyon is like journeying from the desert to the peaks of the Rockies is proving remarkably apt. Yet, in a welcome inversion, our approaching summit is one that will be sweetened with civilisation: a timber-hewn hotel in the nearby gateway town of Tusayan; a warming bath and bed. And, before any of that, a pizza and beer feast in which we will trade favourite moments from our time spent ‘toiling through the labyrinths’ of this extraordinary place. John Wesley Powell, I like to think, would have approved.