First Visit to Phantom Ranch

At the end of February of my sophomore year in high school, I took a trip to the Grand Canyon in Northern Arizona to visit my dad. He had moved to Grand Canyon in October after splitting up with my mom in June at the end of my freshman year. He took a job working inside the Grand Canyon, yes, the Grand Canyon. One of the seven wonders of the natural world. This would be my first time to see everything and everyone that he was seeing because for the past six months my dad had had no one to share his life with except his new acquaintances and with old acquaintances through phone calls and letters. I think he was more excited than me.
He picked me up at the Vegas Airport and without even much of a cheerful hello he said to me, “Alright now watch where we are going through the airport because next time you are going to have to do this by yourself.” I thought, right, like I am going to remember this the next time. We drove from Las Vegas to Grand Canyon, about a four hour drive. It took just a bit longer than it should because it was nearly a blizzard outside. I thought, wow, I am going to Arizona in February, I can come back with a tan. It did not matter how many times my dad said to me that he lived in Northern Arizona at 7000’ in elevation. In my mind I perceived sun, desert, and cactus. Now I believed as I saw it up close with my own eyes. It was snowing like crazy and cars were going off the road at constant rates. Of course, my dad being the excellent driver that he was did not go off the road, but he did manage to throw some driving tips in there along the way.

We arrived at the canyon and I got to see my dad’s house. It was not what I expected. When my dad left my mom we lived in a large house on twenty acres in Washington State. To see my dad living in a house with only minimal furniture, two bedrooms, a small living room, a small kitchen, and a small bathroom began to open up a world that I had never seen from him before. There were boxes stacked up all over the living room because he had just moved in from a small trailer he was living in with another park service employee. For a bachelor’s pad, it worked well. There was no carpet to vacuum, but also no dishwasher and just a washing machine with no dryer. I don’t know if I had been pampered my whole life but it seemed odd to me that my father could afford a much nicer place, but had chosen to rent this house instead. That was probably when I learned that it was not what was lived in that was important, but where one lived. We didn’t stay in the house very long because within minutes we were on our way to the Bright Angel Trail for a hike down to Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the canyon where my father worked. I learned to enjoy hiking much earlier from my dad because of adventures like these. Some parents take their children to the movies or to the city park for quality time. My father took me on ten to twenty mile treks through the wilderness.

The Bright Angel Trail was the most used trail in the entire canyon. It lead from the South Rim all the way down to the bottom of the canyon at Phantom Ranch. It was a miserable first few miles since visibility was terrible because of the snow and the cold weather did not help to make life more comfortable. As we went further into the canyon, the snow turned to mud and mud caked our shoes and our pants. As we passed by Indian Gardens, which is the halfway point at four and a half miles from the rim and 2000 vertical feet below, the weather cleared up. When I looked down the Devil’s Corkscrew, which was a steep set of switchbacks about a mile past the Gardens, I saw the most beautiful sight in all my days. In the winter, this part of the canyon was green and with the mist hanging over it, it looked like paradise. I was amazed and very impressed with the diversity of environments in the canyon and how wonderfully beautiful it was. It was just an incredibly beautiful hike to see the vast space and temples of rock looming in the distance. As we reached the muddy brown, yet enormous Colorado River, we began to see people with a strange walk that Dad referred to as the Kaibab Shuffle. It was pretty much a walk that looks like someone has a stick stuck up their butt. Some people had a bit of a tough time on a ten-mile hike where one drops five thousand vertical feet. I was doing fine though. We came to the Silver Bridge that lead across the Colorado River to Phantom Ranch and that made me rather nervous. The panels put on the bridge for support to walk on were see-through, so one can see the mighty Colorado rushing under their feet 50 yards below. Dad made fun of me as usual by jumping up and down on the bridge to show me that there was nothing to be scared of.

We arrived at “his house” at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was not actually in Phantom Ranch, but only one half mile away by the wastewater treatment plant where he worked. The house consisted of two rooms and a bathroom. As I walked in the door there was the kitchen/dining room with a table, stove, sink, refrigerator, and a small counter top. As we walked further into the house a small room with two beds and a couch was used as the bedroom/living room. The bathroom was nice with a shower. This place was much better than I expected with running water and electricity. I was expecting to be roughing it at the bottom of the big hole. Dad had put a lot of work into the place, though, as I heard stories later about its past condition with bugs crawling all around. I was obviously still a little spooked about the chance of seeing scorpions or actually getting stung by one. Dad informed me he had only seen two in the house in the six months he had been there, but one is enough to do a significant amount of damage. There was nothing more disconcerting than the chance of a nasty insect waking me up in the middle of the night with its poisonous tail pounding into my flesh sending an intense flash of pain throughout my body and incapacitating me for the next day.
So after a night of hanging out with Dad, at his house that overlooked the Bright Angel Creek with the most awesome view off the porch where we could see hikers stumbling in off the other main trail, the South Kaibab, we got up the next day to take a hike on the Clear Creek Trail. The Clear Creek Trail for the first mile and a half is just a painful uphill climb. After a mile, we arrived on an overlook of Phantom Ranch and I fully appreciated the exquisite beauty of Phantom Ranch. In a thick layer of beautiful green cottonwood trees lays a dozen or so dormitory style buildings, small scale amphitheater, the Bright Angel Campground and mule barns. All this was enclosed on the sides by enormous rock columns of Vishnu Schist and Zoroaster Granite and in the background the top formations rise up covered brilliantly by the white of the snow that had fallen the day before. As we continued on the trail, we found some illegal campers and Dad went down to talk to them going above and beyond the call of duty since he was not even working. But Brian, the ranger on duty down at Phantom that Dad reported the incident to, let them off with a warning because Brian was too sick to get up there.
The Clear Creek Trail flattened out after much elevation gain on the Tonto platform and it was a wondrously gorgeous hike. With Zoroaster Temple and Sumner Butte rising up above the relatively flat ground that we walked on as we criss crossed through small side canyons and long plains of cactus and other sorts of prickly desert vegetation. An amazing thing happened that I have come to know later was very rare. It began to snow and at the elevation that we were at, snow was not the most common thing to see. I was so determined to get a tan, because I was in Arizona, that I was still wearing a short sleeved shirt. The trail was only supposed to be seven miles by Dad’s calculation, but it actually ended up being more like ten miles. At the end of the trail, we went down a beautiful formation of some kind of bright red rock that was very loose and was tough to climb down as we walked upon steep cliffs where a false step could mean injury if not worse fate than that, but we came this far, so we might as well see Clear Creek. It was a trickle with a few trees next to it, not much compared to the torrents of water in Western Washington. The area seemed so secluded and beautiful around the creek, I just imagined bringing friends out and staying for a few days and exploring the vast wonderland of canyon all encompassing my perception.
We made it back to the Ranch later that night. We ate dinner at the canteen area. Dad paid $17.00 a piece for a meal of beef stew. He usually got to eat in the back for free. He was just being a good Dad and treating his son. While at dinner, a young woman was smitten with my dad. I gave her some dirty looks because this was the first real social situation I had seen my dad in with a member of the opposite sex since my parents separated, so it was a little awkward. After dinner, Dad and I watched a movie at the Ranger Station. I was quite impressed by all the amenities that existed down at the bottom of the canyon. The Backcountry Rangers were a little more pampered than Dad as they had a television with VCR to keep themselves entertained. I am sure that my dad could have had a television if he would have wanted one, but it would dilute the enjoyment from the natural setting.
The next day it was time to hike on out of the canyon which to most people would just mean the simple task of taking one trail and going out on it, which was nevertheless still classified as strenuous. Not us though, we were experienced creative hikers or at least Dad was and I just followed him. There were two trails that go into the corridor of the canyon on the south side, one is the Bright Angel and the other is the South Kaibab. Well we went up the South Kaibab until we got to a place commonly called Tipoff where the steep rock flattens out to a broad platform, which was the same elevation as the Clear Creek Trail, just across the Colorado River. We cut across this platform, staying at relatively the same elevation on the Tonto Trail for about five miles, until we ran into the Bright Angel Trail at Indian Gardens.
While we were hiking on the Tonto, Dad was carrying his radio with him even though he was not working and we heard that hikers had reported seeing a body up near the top. Dad, of course, was too far away to help. As we neared the end of our hike, we saw the body from a distance with a swarm of search and rescue people around it. They decided that this woman must have jumped off the canyon and killed herself. How sad and lonely can one be to kill themselves? And obviously this was not the smartest place to kill oneself. She must have bounced for quite some time before coming to a stop where she would have probably suffered an agonizing death. Hmmmm. Probably was not a good idea. She tried to romanticize death by jumping into the Grand Canyon, but it did not work as in the end the same horrid result still occurred.

Well the next day, Dad drove me to Vegas. We went by Hoover Dam which was quite an impressive structure. A lot of concrete went into making that destructive dam. I was not impressed much because man made structures have never interested me considerably. We ate a hearty buffet breakfast at the Excalibur in Las Vegas. It was kind of a scam though considering that the line was so long, there were no seconds. What is the point of a buffet with no seconds? Well, I flew back to Washington on the plane from Vegas after a very successful visit where we did 42 miles of hiking thinking that I would not come back to Grand Canyon again except maybe to visit my pa, but holy gees was I mistaken. If I had known the impact that this brand new exciting world would have on my life, I could not have even imagined. Movies made by experienced Hollywood directors could not have wrapped up the intensity of life I was destined to have at Grand Canyon. (Written in 2000)