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Free Hiking the Grand Canyon - Kibbey Butte page 5 |
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I slept through my alarm, although my watch was nearby. Still, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and realized that I had to get going. My breakfast of an instant breakfast drink, peanut butter and honey on a bagel and an avocado just hit the spot. By 6 o’clock I was on my way up the canyon. Without flowing water, it was easier to hike up the bed. At a major junction, I momentarily missed my way. I followed the main bed for a bit, as my view was quite obscured by the trees and bushes growing all around. I regained my course, and the going got slower. There were lots of fallen trees across the bed that had to be bypassed. I fell down a couple of times, which made me more angry with myself than anything else. One gets to feeling just punch drunk when hiking over terrain like this. As I neared the end of this box canyon I could start to detect the wonder of the Redwall chute. By 8 a.m. I had reached the end of the bed and could look 90 degrees to my right up this compressed passage. It was the narrowest of cracks and yet it safely gets one through some 600 feet of this cliff layer. While steep in some spots, and rocky all the way through, it was as close to ideal as one can come in the canyon. I easily climbed up through the Redwall, and had started through part of the Supai. It took barely a half an hour. I carry a micro-cassette recorder to get an accurate account of the time, as well as to record other thoughts I have. It was easy to see, from up here, what was going on ahead of me. My recorded comments paint the picture pretty well, “From here the Supai looks just absolutely horrible, so, I guess that’s the story.” The fault that generated this route didn’t break apart the upper 150 feet of Supai, hence the difficulty of making this route work. I had taken the time to literally draw a map of Steck’s route description through this section of Supai. I drew in the right descent ravine, the ponderosa that is supposed to line up with Brady Peak, the large overhang, the detached white tower, the critical chimneys to climb, along with the spacing between them, the curious ponderosa grove, with its seep spring and final contour into the ravine leading to the Redwall chute. I must have read the description a half dozen times, and decided that a picture map would be preferred. By the time I got here, the map was burned into my memory. Although certainly crude, it worked for me. Steck had taken some two and a half hours to come down through this section, although it was hot, there were four in the group, and they had heavy packs. I was traveling solo, had a light pack, the temperatures were perfect and I anticipated that I could climb up through spots with the pack on my back. It took me some 45 minutes to contour over to the first landmark here--a grove of ponderosa trees and a bit of a seep spring. The contour was quite miserable, although I was following the hint of a deer trail. On more than a few occasions I found myself holding onto the limbs of trees and bushes while dancing my way across especially steep and unstable ground. A bigger pack would have made this much worse. From the ponderosa grove, the route unfolded before me just as shown on my map. It seems a rare thing for events to develop just as planned! I easily found all of the right spots, including the crucial crack that has a fir branch growing down through it, used to assist along the way. This was the only place I had to take my pack off, and raise it up after me. I’m sure that I didn’t win any style points through here, but was happy to find the going as easy as it was.
Now near the
base of Kibbey, I was on familiar ground. I had been down here, from
the rim, a couple of years ago. Although tedious, and sometimes very
steep through the forested pines, from here I was on the rim in less than
an hour. Some three hours after that I arrived back at my truck,
having picked up my water cache along the way. It was a simply
fabulous hike. |
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