Conquering Fears

canyon confrontation

Hiking the lightly traveled Grandview and New Hance trails requires facing fears

In the depths of the Grand Canyon, I am

alone with terrible thoughts. Water sloshes reassuringly in my canteens, so I know I won't perish from thirst, but the trail ahead appears to become one with a 600-foot-long precipice. Something deep inside knows each footfall carries me closer to the edge. There should be no real danger. After all, others have come this way before, felt their pulses race and then plumbed for the resolve to go on. Like me, they could have chosen a different path.

As much as I fear what I'm about to do, I know this is the trail for me - the one offering the delicious tingle that comes from testing personal limits and, as a solo hiker in the Canyon backcountry, I know I've come for that as much as the incomparable scenery. The knowledge learned other times out here alone, the 50 pounds of gear on my back-these are my only resources inside the Canyon where water is scarce, distances tricky and help a long way off. I consider this as I hike the Tonto Trail, up from Hance Rapids on the Colorado River. The route I am following began down the New Hance Trail, a 6-mile descent off the South Rim through a geologic layer cake that spans a billion years. In six hours, I go from early alpine spring on top to early desert summer at the Colorado River. Sprays of yellow, blue and violet wildflowers cling to the pitched and tumbled canyon walls. Fendler bushes, with their large white four-petal blossoms, seduce native black bees. Halfway down, cliff roses bloom. At the bottom, flowering acacia and pink-blossomed tamarisk perfume the air so heavily I am forced to my knees to savor the aroma of the ground-hugging evening primrose. Solo hikers think foremost of their knees. I didn't want mine hurt. The man who suggested the New Hance Trail to me

had to be helicoptered out with injuries.

Twoand three-foot step-downs slow me. Crumbled rock scoots underfoot, setting me off-balance. In places, I inch down while "braking" with a metal ski pole. Other times I let the stick sniff the trail ahead for firm footholds and around narrow rocky places.

Peter Carey of San Jose, California, comes up as I go down. A real estate salesman and amateur photographer trekking in one of the largest undeveloped chunks of real estate anywhere, he took the Tanner Trail, farther east, off the South Rim. "I've been coming here solo for six years," Carey says. "I've hiked all the trails from Hermit Trail to here."

Next, he says, he would go where no trails exist, where the ante for personal tests comes higher. "I'm ready now," he says. He sounds determined.

The New Hance emerges from the gray Paleozoic epoch into bright ochre-colored Red Canyon, a shale deposit nearly a billion years old laid by Proterozoic seas. Sometimes water flows through the canyon, but only stagnant pools remain in early May. Rounding a red bluff, I surprise a coatimundi going to hunt tadpoles.

I hear the angry, hissing water of Hance Rapids a quarter-mile away. Red Canyon ends where white water boils over halfsubmerged boulders. White sand dunes, tailings from the rock-grinding river, provide a soft cushion for the trail-weary to lie upon. My timing is perfect. High clouds offerprotection from the sun where few shade trees grow. Swollen by upstream releases from Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado River flows emerald-clear. I have the whole place to myself, at least for a while.

protection from the sun where few shade trees grow. Swollen by upstream releases from Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado River flows emerald-clear. I have the whole place to myself, at least for a while.

The water looks fishy. I lob a No. 5 Mepps spinner into the tail of the rapids. A 16-inch rainbow trout flashes silver and soon joins me for dinner. One fish is all I take on any wilderness hike-it's a personal conservation code.

Geologist Christa Sadler of Flagstaff and two students arrive for two days of fieldwork and set up camp 100 yards from my tent. “This area was once just about at sea level,” she says, explaining that the canyonland was lifted, twisted, sizzled by volcanoes, drowned repeatedly by ancient seas, covered by drifting sands and then sliced in half by the Colorado.

The 1.2 billion-year-old Vishnu schist, some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth, first appears just below Hance Rapids. “That's why this hike is such a special one,” Sadler says.

Hance Rapids and the trail are named for “Captain” John Hance, an early Canyon settler, teller of tall tales, miner and early tourist guide. The asbestos mine Hance bored into the side of a cliff two blocks below the rapids can still be seen.

This night the clouds move somewhere else, and from my tent pegged down near a bubbling salt seep, the night sky appears illuminated by distant lanterns. Sirius, the brightest star, shines like a spotlight. The rapids blow a breeze over me, and sleep is all the doctoring I need for my overused muscles.

Morning light reveals the Colorado red

again with silt. James R. Reed, a computer software engineer from Plymouth, Minnesota, and Beat Stahr, a physicist from Bern, Switzerland, hike into camp. They took the Tanner Trail down, followed the Escalante Route downstream and are headed for their next water stop-and mine, too-Hance Creek, along the Tonto Trail.

Neither has hiked in the Canyon before. Reed says he became sick yesterday with dehydration in the 90-degree temperatures.

As I shelter myself from the sun under a tamarisk bush, a National Park Service pontoon boat labors for shore with an engine propeller bent during a dash through the rapids. I meet Mark Law, the river district manager, and Jeff Kracht, the North Rim backcountry supervisor.

The New Hance Trail is not the most well-defined trail, Law says. “We average two or three rescues a year.” Kracht confides that he was one of them. “I got rained on at Hance Rapids and I became hypothermic, and higher up [the trail] the rain turned to snow. I couldn't find the trail, and I had to radio to have a ranger come to the trailhead and honk his horn so I could find my way out.”Rescue is costly for those who require it. A complicated rescue by helicopter could run several thousand dollars. Injured hikers once were hauled out on mules, but insurance problems ended that option. “It's hard to get a mule certified [as a medical technician] anyway,” Law jokes, before he and his patrol crew push off downstream.

The moment has come to pull the pegs, shoulder the pack and set out. The Tonto Trail begins at Hance Rapids and winds through a jumble of rockfall marked by cairns, before opening onto the Tonto Pla-teau after a haul up 1,000 feet of elevation from the river, a first small step toward the 7,000-foot-high South Rim, still about 6 miles beyond.

I'm at the place that makes me fearful. For 30 feet, the trail is thin and much too close to a giddy drop-off for my liking.

"You can do it,” I reassure myself, talking aloud. “Keep those feet moving, don't look down.” My voice startles a ground squirrel. It bolts across the trail, tricking my eyes to look up and out. I don't like what I see. “You can do it,” I mumble, and make it across. But the fear hangs on, sloshing around inside for several minutes. I leave the precipice behind but discover that more ledges loom ahead.

The designated camping area at Hance Creek stands empty. Reed and Stahr have already cleared out. The creek dribbles toward the pit I've just skirted. I decide not to overnight here and take a branch trail straight up the flank of Horseshoe Mesa. A miner's steel wheelbarrow and sign mark Page Spring, a wet grotto at 5,000 feet elevation. Canteens topped off, I climb past two copper mines dug in 1902 and feel that old feeling as I mount a thin switchback up a rock face, until I reach the well-tamped Grandview Trail.

I'm too high on wilderness to loiter at the Horseshoe Mesa campground, popular with day-hiking tourists, so I keep climbing. Blazed by miners in the 1890s, the Grandview Trail is surprisingly steep and features lots of open space along the edges. Some parts of the trail hang from rock bolts and cabled logs. “It is intense,” confides an unnerved middle-aged man on a day hike. But he finds inside himself what he needs to keep going.

So do I. Sucking hard candy for sugar energy, I struggle free of the Grandview, 9 miles from the river and almost a mile up, at just over a mile an hour, and scatter personal chimeras behind me on the trail. AH Phoenix adventurer Tom Kuhn regularly tackles difficult hikes.

While working as a National Park Service ranger at the Grand Canyon, Richard L. Danley hiked many miles of its trail system. He lives in Flagstaff.

LOCATION: 12 miles east of Grand Canyon Village; Grandview Trailhead is well marked. New Hance Trailhead, 4 miles farther east, is marked by a sign off the road.

TRAVEL ADVISORY: Carry a trail map and adequate water while hiking the Grand Canyon. There is no water source on many of the trails. A permit is required for camping in the Canyon.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Backcountry Information Center, (928)-638-7875. Permit forms available at www.nps.gov/grca/grandcanyon.