Christmas at the Bottom of the Grandest Canyon

Christmas Eve at Phantom Ranch

ON CHRISTMAS EVE DAY, Julie Chaibainou, 25, rode into camp looking much the same, although the scar and slightly askew smile were new. Her arrival caused a sensation at Phantom Ranch on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

"It's like having someone come back from the dead," said Warren Tracy, the ranch manager, after he heard the former employee was returning. "She almost didn't make it."

Chaibainou came down with head packer Russ Knox, 39, whose mules deliver eggs without breaking them. They had descended South Kaibab Trail, the mules pussyfooting around the switchbacks above drops so vast you sometimes feel like you're floating free through the air. They had brought with them the last load of presents before Christmas from the snow-rimed top.

The ranch hands turned out to greet Chaibainou. Only three months before, she had so many broken bones her X-ray pictures resembled broken pottery. Rock-climbing alone in the Canyon, without ropes, she had lost her purchase and fallen 150 feet.

One of Knox's packers heard her cry for help, and a lot of people helped haul her out of the Canyon. Nobody, including Knox, expected her back. He stood there now, wearing bearskin chaps against the chill morning, and spoke of her will to live. "She's one of the toughest people I know," he said.

"All I remember is losing my handhold and falling." Remembering is unpleasant for Chaibainou. A few months before her own accident, a coworker had fallen to her death while climbing in the Canyon.

"I hit on my right side. I broke my pelvis, tailbone, knee, hip, right wrist, most of my ribs, jaw mandible; and both lungs were punctured." Doctors rebuilt her with titanium plate, pins, and trusses and sent her home to Oklahoma City.

She mended, but was not healed. She had returned to where she fell to face her fear.

"I didn't feel really recovered until I got down here," she said. "It's a great Christmas gift."

Chaibainou's homecoming, back to nurturing friends and her wilderness job, went almost unnoticed by the dudes and hikers who checked into Phantom Ranch for Christmas from Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada, and around the United States. Most were middle-aged. Some looked unfit for the arduous nine-mile-long climb out. I wondered what possessed them to come.

Like Chaibainou, I discovered, some had personal curative agendas. Others were turning down the volume on commercial Christmas. A few were not Christians, there only by chance.

Leslie Nyman, 45, a health educator from Pelham, Massachusetts, sought herself. She remembered a young woman full of curiosity, but that's not who had looked back from the mirror recently. Christmas seemed a good time for personal resolutions. She and her husband, Mark Berens, 49, a small-animal veterinarian, were lucky to rent a cabin and hiked down. Friends who talked of joining them all backed out.

Christmas Eve at Phantom Ranch

"Twenty-five years ago, life was a great adventure; then you settle in your ways," Nyman added wistfully. She was certain Christmas in the Canyon would be "a good marker."

"For me," she said, "this has become a way to experience adventure again."

Peggy Miller, 47, of Columbus, Ohio, a banking company vice president, expressed similar feelings. We talked under old cottonwood trees that clung to winter-cured leaves of frosted silver. Juniper wreaths tied with red ribbon bows were tacked to all the doors, but there was no decorated Christmas tree, few lights, and no Christmas music.

Miller talked about job burnout, middleage crisis, and the need to move the fron tiers of her life outward. To underscore her resolve, she'd given her husband, Bill, 53, a financial planner, an outdoor adventure book for Christmas with instructions "to pick an adventure every year."

"I've always been Christmas-oriented," she said, "but I've changed in the last couple of years. I'm not driven by having to do everything like I used to."

The Grand Canyon was adventure No. 1. "Peggy gave this trip to me as a Christmas present," said Bill, who had the frontheavy look of a deskman. They had hiked in, and now it seemed every daylight moment his wife had him on the move, off hiking somewhere.

"When I'm here, I just can't get enough of it," she said.

Serge Killingsworth, 37, a high school mathematics teacher, and his wife, Nancy, 37, a nurse, of Mount Shasta, California, were determined to spend Christmas in a ranch cabin. "On the first day reservations opened," she said, "we called. It took 40 minutes on the phone to get them; I kept pressing redial. We decided on Christmas Day [the prior year] we would return here."

They cooked over a one-burner propane stove on a bench outside the dining hall with sons Owen, 11, and Miles, eight, and friends David Cowsky, 53, a medical social worker, and his wife, Kathie, 48. The Killingsworths had tasted adventure early and never gave up on it.

In 1981 the two of them bicycled across America. "On $10 a day," she added.

"There's more to Christmas than trees and presents," she said. "We're spending ours with dear friends."

Suddenly she became aware her youngest son was listening and added, "We called Santa on an 800 number and asked him to come to our house late."

Phantom Ranch occupies a notch canyon of chocolate-colored basalt ancient beyond comprehension. Bright Angel Creek races past, cold and clear, after gushing from a spring eight miles upcanyon. The ranch is the hub for three popular trails: North Kaibab, South Kaibab, and Bright Angel.

Reserving one of the 92 rental beds at the ranch requires luck, especially over holidays. Then you have to get there, and there are only two ways: ride a mule or walk, descending more than a mile of elevation in the process. The mules are used to it, but most people aren't.

Everything must be carried in even Christmas. There are no cars, almost no radio or television reception, and just one public phone over which calls only go out. Mail goes by mule. The supper menu does not vary year-round - steak or hiker's stew - but for Christmas the mules haul down frozen turkeys.

A polyglot murmur, and English spoken in a variety of accents, rose above the clatter of busy flatware. Victoria, Australia, policeman Steve Pope, 26, on his honeymoon, was taking the Queen's English on a tour of the outback, and Korawit Wacharasindhu, 34, of Bangkok, a squadron leader in the Thai Air Force, was exchanging bursts of Thai with two sisters and a friend.

"We decided, why not?" Wacharasindhu said, and so they had all come down on mules. "My sister called to get reservations [from Bangkok]." Before lunch one day, they hiked four miles up the canyon and back in city clothes.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) From left, Bill and Peggy Miller of Columbus, Ohio, Steve Radowski of Scottsdale, Tom and Jean Pierce of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and Cindy Radowski, also of Scottsdale take a rest break on a hike to Ribbon Falls.

(ABOVE) Fisherman Darryl Brammeier of Phoenix has spent 15 Christmases at the Canyon.

(RIGHT) When Julie Chaibainou, still wearing a cast on her arm from a near fatal Canyon fall, returned to the ranch, her fellow employees were stunned.

Jung-Yueh Chang, 26, and Hsin-Tze Trao, 24, of Taipei, both attending Colorado universities, got the idea to come from a Chinese-language newspaper. "We wanted to see the Canyon," Hsin-Tze said. "We just did not want to take pictures on the Rim and leave."

Speaking with the unmistakable accent of their native England, Jean Pierce, 58, and her husband, Tom, 61, a retired construction manager, of Vancouver, British Columbia, said Christmas at Phantom Ranch was, for them, a major detour from tradition. Instead of being home for their three grandchildren and family gatherings, they had embarked in a recreation vehicle for the American Southwest.

"It's the first time I haven't cooked a

Christmas Eve at Phantom Ranch

Christmas dinner in 26 years," Jean said. A billion years of geologic distance separates the Canyon floor from the outside, just right for German-born Dr. Gisela Strand-Hales, 53. A language teacher at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, she was on her second Christmas visit to the ranch. She and husband Larry Hales, 47, a General Motors Corporation executive who commutes to work in Shenyang, China, returned because "to me, it was the most wonderful thing I'd done," she said. "It's like coming to the center of the Earth, to the center of time. "And we're here [again] to find our own center." My bed in the bunkhouse was adjacent to that of Wally Mays, a 49-year-old Santa Fe Railway freight conductor from Mount Shasta, California, so I learned he and his wife, Debbie, 41, were commercial Christmas dropouts. They were with daughter Janai, 16, and son Christopher, nine, separating each night to the men's and women's dorms, but in the daytime hiking as a family and huddling around a backpacker's propane stove, cooking outdoors. "This starts a new thing for us," she said. "We're really trying to break tradition. "But we put up a little tree before we left," she added sheepishly. "And we exchanged gifts before we left." They even "left gifts in the car on top," to be opened after they climbed out on Christmas Day. "We call them 'solstice gifts,'" she said. "People ask us why we want to spend Christmas with a bunch of strangers," said Cindy Radowski, 31, of Scottsdale. "I tell them we all have something in common: hiking." She and husband Steve, 34, an environ-nmental engineer, were on a stress holiday. It was their 23rd hike into the Canyon, their second Christmas at Phantom Ranch. "He has a lot of pressure at work," she explained. "When you hike, you have to concentrate on what you're doing. All those internal pressures get released." A threepoint mule deer buck browsed on the ju-niper decorations that ringed the dining room windows as we talked "We have a tree at home and Christmas gifts," he said. "All the presents are wrapped, all the cookies are baked," she added. When they return home two days after Christmas, he said, "we will open presents, have a fire. That's part of the incentive." A Christmas cold front stained the day gray. Plump clouds sagged like wet batten below the Canyon rim, sprinkling the bottom with rain. A damp chill settled over the ranch. College students Jack Gburek, 22, of State College, Pennsylvania, and Auram Slovic, 18, of Philadelphia, their backpacks leaking belongings, chose that moment to move their camp to Bright (OPPOSITE PAGE) Hikers on the Kaibab Trail stop to savor a view of the Colorado River and the Bright Angel Trail bridge. (ABOVE) Mark Burns, a veterinarian from Maine, scans for birds on Cedar Ridge while following the Kaibab Trail.

Angel Campground just below the ranch. Gburek was Christian; Slovic, Jewish. They had resolved any religious differences over Christmas and Chanukah by observing "winter solstice." With three days remaining on a six-day camping permit, they were meeting adventure head-on. "It's outrageous; it's great!" Slovic exclaimed. "I've never been anywhere like this. We heard a coyote the first night. That was a first." Gburek smiled weakly. "It's my first Christmas away from home," he said. "I miss them."