Then to make things worse, just as we were about to get on the bus to the trailhead, I realized that we had left our Leki hiking poles back in the hotel room. So the whole point of eating that early breakfast was now all for not as we were going to miss the shuttle anyway. We went to back to the front desk of the Maswik Lodge to get a key so we could get back into our room and retrieve our poles. I then drove to the South Kaibab trailhead rather wait for the next shuttle which wouldn't be until 8:40. I still managed to beat the bus to the trailhead but now we had a problem as we would be hiking out on one trail and the car would be located at another. Such is life.

Luckily that seemed to be the end of the problems and the hike down the South Kaibab proceeded without incident. We started down at 7 am and we were at Cedar Ridge around 7:45. The weather on the way down was delightful... cool and shady but very windy with gusts possibly as high as 30-40 mph. By the time we hit Cedar Ridge you could feel the heat starting to take hold of the place. The South Kaibab trail can be like a blast furnace during mid-day which is why hardly anyone ever hikes out of the Canyon on it. After a quick pit stop at Cedar Ridge we were on the trail again.

plants who’s internal biologic clocks had decided that the time had come for them to reproduce. Many had shot their stalks and accompanying seed pods up at least as high as 8 or 10 feet into the sky and some may have gone as high as 15 feet or higher. At around 9 am we reached the northern end of arm that extends out into the Canyon and started down the Redwall descent. The whole South Kaibab trail is an engineering marvel and the descent through the Redwall is no exception. We had to step off of the trail at switchbacks a few times to let the mule trains pass which gave us a little time to rest. The heat was really starting to build up now and I also took some time to put on some sunscreen while waiting for that last mule train to pass. Robin had been wearing it since Cedar Ridge.

By 9:30 we had reached the bottom of the Redwall break and were now heading north on the Tonto Platform towards the "Tipoff", a spot near the junction of the South Kaibab and Tonto Trails where the South Kaibab takes that final plunge into the inner gorge. I glanced upwards at one point just beyond where the trail swings around the northeast end of the butte and had a very view of the natural arch way up where we had just come down from. We arrived at the "Tipoff" around 10 am and rested briefly, with some other hikers, in the shade of the chemical toilets and sucked down some Gookinade This last stretch was bound to be very hot.

It was hot but not as bad as it could have been as there were still some sizable patches of shade to be found under some of the higher cliff faces. Some of the views of the Colorado River, inner gorge, suspension bridges and Bright Angel Campground on the other side of the river, that are found along this section of trail are fantastic. It took close to an hour to descend this final section allowing for numerous rest stops in the shade and other stops for photo opportunities. At around 11:15 we reached the tunnel that leads through the final section of rock along the river and connects the trail to the Black Suspension Bridge.

The river was running nice and green, as it would be all week, and a river party from O.A.R.S. had put in at the beach just below and downriver from the bridge. We headed straight for the campground and arrived there at 11:45, picked out a site and setup camp. After setting up camp we headed up to Phantom Ranch to check in for our evening meal. While we were there we also had a couple of nice cold cups of lemonade (with ice!).

After all that was taken care of we headed down to the boat beach to frolic in the sand, sun and water. The O.A.R.S. party was still there and I had an opportunity to talk with some of the river guides as well as some of the passengers. This was quite fortuitous as Robin and I would be taking the exact same trip with O.A.R.S. just one year later. The guides seemed quite knowledgeable and the passengers that we talked to all claimed to be having a great time. The river party was waiting for some new people to join the group here. Some people were only taking the upper-river portion of the trip and would be hiking back out to the rim from here and others would be hiking in to join the party for the lower-river portion. The full river trip from Lee's Ferry below Glen Canyon Dam to Diamond Creek on the lower Colorado River (or sometimes Pierce Ferry at the northeast end of Lake Mead) is 13 days. The upper-river portion from Lee's Ferry to Phantom Ranch is 5 days and the lower-river portion from Phantom Ranch to the end is 8 days. If anyone is interested in doing all of part of this trip in May of 1997, Robin and I are looking for recruits. We hung around at the beach for a couple of hours and talked with the people gathered there. The people who were joining the river trip here finally arrived and were given some lengthy safety instruction before the rafts finally took to the river again.

We headed back to our campsite to rest in some shade for a while before heading over for dinner at the ranch. The sun had finally gone behind the western wall of schist next to which we were camped and our site had plenty of shade. I wrote out the postcards that I had carried in from the rim so that I could stamp them "MAILED BY MULE" and drop them in the mail bag at the Phantom Ranch canteen. After a while at our site we decided to head up to the ranch and mingle with other folks who were waiting for the dinner bell to chime (yes, they really do that there!).

The smells wafting out from the kitchen were truly magnificent, even more so than when we had stopped in for lemonade earlier in the afternoon. Everyone was in good spirits and seemed very hungry. At slightly after 6:30 the dinner bell rang and our hostess for the evening came out and gave us our seating instructions. We all then proceeded to file into the canteen, took seats at our assigned tables and began to feast. The stew dinner, in my humble opinion, is definitely the finest fare that Phantom Ranch has to offer and I would have eaten it both nights that we were down there but it was sold out for the second night and we were left with the steak dinner.

The conversation at dinner was quite interesting. I always like to hear the impressions of first timers hiking in the Canyon and our table had quite a few of them. At one point I just happened to ask the guy who was sitting across from me (who was a newbie) if he had access to the WWW and if he had seen the "unofficial" Grand Canyon WWW site. He did and he had and he was also quite surprised when I told him that I was the author. He introduced me to a friend of his who was seated at the same table and who had apparently planned most of the trip using my site. This was getting to be too much. Then a woman seated a little further down the table joins in with, "You're Bob!", making it sound as if something in the universe of out of alignment. I was beginning to feel that I had come across one of those temporal anomalies that have become so popular in the Star Trek universe as a way of explaining the unexplainable. She claimed to have E-mailed me some months back when she had begun preparing for the trip and seemed to be quite pleased to be meeting me in person. I also found a couple of guys from Germany, one of which had used the site to plan their trip. It was a very interesting dinner and we all got together at the Beer Hall later that evening to talk some more about the Canyon.

Maria, her husband Randy, her parents and her friend Craig were doing a rim-to-rim hike from north to south coming down the North Kaibab Trail and going up the Bright Angel Trail. Maria and Randy both work for COMPAQ in Houston and no doubt have excellent access to the web. Maria has sent me a trip report which has been posted in the Happy Campers section. Jennifer, from Chicago, had left her husband on the rim and had come down the South Kaibab Trail and would also be going out the on the Bright Angel. Her access to the web is via America On-Line. The guys from Germany had come in on the Bright Angel and were staying a couple of days at the ranch to do some day hikes in the area. I don't believe they had made up their mind as to an exit route yet. Their access to the web was via a computer at their school in Germany.

I would like to send a special "Thank You" to Maria, Randy, Craig and Jennifer and anyone else who made that evening so wonderful for me. I was very happy to see these pages being put to such good use. It is very difficult to remember sometimes that there are real people on the other end of all of these wires.