Kaibab Journal - Free Hiking the Grand Canyon - Kibbey Butte


Free Hiking the Grand Canyon - Kibbey Butte page 2

My exit is known by the rather laconic name of “The Kibbey Butte Route.” It is a way to enter, and exit, the Grand Canyon’s Nankoweap area from the North Rim. On the face of it, the description defies common sense: a ropeless route (save for lowering/raising packs a couple of times) that has an elevation change of approximately 2500 feet over a horizontal distance of less than a half mile. Seemingly quite mad, yet the allure is obvious. There are precious few places in the Grand Canyon where this is possible. Our common perception of the canyon being comprised of sheer barrier cliffs is not without reason. However, this route takes one through, from top to bottom, the Kaibab limestone, the Coconino sandstone, the Supai group of sandstones and limestones and the Redwall limestone cliff layers. The namesake of this route is Kibbey Butte, a very unassuming formation in the Hermit shale level, peaking below the Coconino sandstone cliffs. Easily visible from the popular Point Imperial viewpoint, on the North Rim, it would likely be the last thing any visitor there would notice. Indeed, from this vantage point, a route from rim to canyon floor looks quite impossible. But, the course is blessed with two huge advantages. One is an easy route through the forested rim to the bottom of the Coconino level. The other is a painfully easy and narrow chute through the Redwall. The heart stopper is the upper 100-150 feet of Supai. Two of the canyon’s best known hikers/explorers spent much time and energy piecing together this route, over a number of forays into this area, although they were separated in time by some two decades. Harvey Butchart, the celebrated master of Grand Canyon hiking, in the company of sometime hiking companion George Beck, actually made an aerial survey of this route in the 1960s. Butchart’s original bypass of the tricky Supai led him to a miserable contour above the Redwall in order to get to the appropriate “fault ravine.” It took him a number of climbs through here before finding a suitably direct way through the Supai. Although his description of this route is included in the voluminous trail logs he has bestowed upon the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University, it didn’t make it into any of his three hiking books. George Steck, whose hikes in the canyon were legendary before he wrote two books describing fabulously attractive loop hikes here, independently sought and found this same route through the Supai. Like Butchart, Steck also conducted an aerial survey, although this time in the mid-1980s. With a number of false tries, both from the top and the bottom, he also finally succeeded in identifying the proper route through the Supai. The description is well-written up in Steck’s second book (Grand Canyon Loop Hikes II, published by Chockstone Press).