What are You Looking for?

Across The Grand Canyon Twice, In 11 Photos

this is a photo of my wife, hilary, and our little guy, jay. hilary wanted to do some-thing big the year after she gave birth to jay, so she suggested we do the rim-to-rim-to-rim in the grand canyon. you can see a bit of the 48-mile* route in this photo, but jay has no idea. If you were to try to explain it to a toddler, you might say, “you go down to the bottom, up to the other side over there, and then you turn around and come back.” we figured all we needed to do the r2r2r was someone to watch jay for the day, a few months to train, no injuries, and to stay healthy. we got some friends to watch jay for the day, anyway.

this is a photo of the plan hilary’s physical therapist, sara, gave her 8.5 weeks from our r2r2r date. with the pregnancy, birth, and other stuff, hilary had already basically taken a year off of running. and then she injured her foot in July. sara is a champion 100-mile ultrarunner, and when hilary asked her about whether the r2r2r was *still* a good idea this year, sara said, “i wouldn’t rule it out.” a month later, with 8 weeks to go, hilary's “long trail day” for the week was a one-hour hike, 2.8 miles. the next week, she did a 2-hour hike.

this is a photo of hilary on the bright angel trail at 6:18 a.m. on october 25th, about four miles into our day. (thankfully, she had done one 26-mile trail run this fall.) after that run, she said, “i can’t believe the r2r2r is almost double that.” i mumbled something like yeah but blah blah, at mile 26 of the r2r2r, you just have 12 miles of downhill left, plus the hike up, we’ll be fine, blah blah. this is a photo of hilary at the colorado river at 7:35 a.m. i was feeling cautiously optimistic, as you do when you have yet to do any of the day’s 11,700 feet of ascent. hilary was being present and reminding me to be grateful for, well, look at the view.

This is a photo of me at a picnic table at Phantom Ranch at 8:21 a.m. Every time I have been there and the canteen is open, I send my parents a postcard that says, “SEND HELP.” Which is a joke because it’s delivered by mule to the rim of the canyon. I told a couple friends about this tradition, and now they send me the same postcards when they’re down there, so I of course have to send them one too. As my friend Paddy says, “What we lack in humor, we make up for in repetition.”

this is a photo of hilary running in the narrows at 8:42 a.m., about mile 10.8, shortly after leaving phantom ranch, and starting up the 14-mile trail toward the north rim. i had done this once before, but it was new terrain for hilary. the last 6 miles are steep, climbing almost 4,000 vertical feet to the rim, and the last two miles, hilary stopped talking to me and started having cramps in her legs. which is not ideal before the halfway point.

this is a photo of a peanut butter sandwich made with two pop-tarts, taken at 1:05 p.m., mile 24 (a friend taught me this trick years ago). just before I made this, we talked to some folks who, like us, had come from the south rim, planning to do the r2r2r, but they had decided to bail. we were not feeling great either, but we hadn’t really discussed the idea of stopping at the north rim (or the logistics of getting back to the south rim). we drank some electrolytes, used the bathroom, filled our water bottles, ate some food, and left, plodding back down into the canyon. gravity made it easy to recommit.

this is a photo of hilary running at about 2:08 p.m., mile 25.6. we weren’t breaking any speed records, but running at any speed was way more heartening than walking. we made it back to phantom ranch in just under 4 hours, took a quick break to fill our water bottles, and started walking. only 10 miles to the top. the sun disappeared, we clicked on our headlamps, and kept hucking ourselves forth on our trekking poles, plugging away up the switchbacks. i had some anxiety about how jay was doing with our friends elizabeth and cody up on the rim, and if they were getting sick of him, and i wondered if hilary did too.

this is a photo of a sign at havasu-pai gardens i took at 6:41 a.m. When we passed it again around 7 p.m., it was dark, and it felt very relevant. but hilary was amazingly still crushing, with five miles to go. suddenly, i bonked, and hurriedly ate some food. then hilary hit a wall, her body finally realizing it had been going for 14 straight hours. all the warning lights came on: cramps, nausea, fatigue. she dry-heaved to the side of the trail, our head-lamps the only visible lights. this was our first all-day child-free date since jay was born. it felt very on-brand. as we passed the 1.5-mile resthouse, i saw the emergency phone, and remembered, oh yeah, you could call for a rescue here. we were clocking 38-minute miles, but we weren’t going to die. we just kind of felt like we were going to die.

this is a photo of a note elizabeth left on our cabin door. what’s funny about it is that it says hilary and i are incredible, but the note itself is irrefutable proof that Elizabeth and cody are the actual heroes of this story. the bright angel lodge cabins are lovely, but small, and i was positively dreading trying to not wake the baby as we stumbled around in the dark trying to find some calories to put in our bodies. they also ordered us a pizza from the maswik pizza pub, and it was sitting on the dresser. i said to hilary, “i think this might be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

this is a photo of hilary and me, the last photo we took that day, at 10:15 p.m., totally worked after 17 hours of up and down. hilary said it was the hardest thing she’d ever done, and i said, “harder than giving birth?” because i watched her do that too, and that was super fucking hardcore. she said it was different. i’ll never know, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. what matters is she did both. jay woke us up at 4:56 the next morning.

 

If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting my work. 

Bybrendan
Updated

Read Next