A Grand Canyon Bucket List Backpack Trip

In March of 2011, Mike set off to hike the Butte Fault Route through the Grand Canyon. After a winter of reading trail and route descriptions and corresponding with other hikers, he successfully completed the backpack trip. I stayed home and worked!

Well, after retiring I decided we needed to repeat this trip as I had added it my bucket list.

After a whole week of pack preparation here at home, we were ready to tackle the two day drive to the South Rim. The dogs stayed at the Big Sky Dog Ranch, our local doggy spa.

Day 1
The only hitch we would end up having was at the beginning of our trip. Betty, our shuttle driver picked us up late after having a flat tire on an earlier shuttle in the day. We arrived at the trailhead in the total dark. What to do, hike the first 3 miles, or camp at the trailhead and add these miles to the next day's miles? We camped at the trailhead.

Day 2
We hiked up the Saddle Mountain Trail to begin our hike into the Canyon via the Nankoweap Trail. I was nervous after watching YouTube videos of the scary spot on this trail. We made it through the scary spot easily, but the rocky downhill was a bugger.

Here is our camp in Nankoweap Creek. We enjoyed the luxury of the table sized rock.

Day 3
This day would prove to be a tough one as we had to cross three creek drainages. We hiked passed Nankoweap Butte and down into the Kwagunt Creek drainage where we loaded 13 liters of water into our packs.

Then it was up to the ridge and over into Malagosa drainage. We rested out of the hot sun under this juniper and then headed up to the ridge again, crossing into the Awatubi drainage where we would camp.

Here we were excited to find an old canteen and some old soldered tin cans. These were probably left by people traveling the Horsethief Route in the early 1900's.

We had a nice camp here although it was a dry camp, thus the 13 liters of water!

Day 4
We left Awatubi and climbed to the next ridge and down into Sixty Mile Canyon.  Another climb to the next ridge put us in the Chuar Valley. We stopped along Lava Creek at a spot called Still Spring. We were happy to take a quick bath in the creek and have flowing water right by our tent.

Day 5
Leaving Still Spring, we climbed to the top of the Tapeats rock formation. We passed some huge fallen boulders. We dropped down off the ridge into Basalt Creek. We walked the dry creek bed for a ways and then traversed into here east fork of this drainage. Here we had to negotiate some pour offs in the creek bed. They looked scary, but were fun to climb through. We came out at the Colorado River and camped for the night on the sand beach.

Day 6
This morning we would hike 3 miles down river along the bank. We enjoyed the ruins at Unkar Delta. This area is the largest archaeology site in the park. It was intriguing to imagination the native people's lives here.

We loaded up on water and had a nice 5 mile walk up the dry creek bed to our camp.

Day 7
This is the day that loomed in my mind. I would have to conquer my fear of heights and climb the red wall cliff.

It did end up being a cliff, and I made it!

Day 8
We climbed out of Vishnu Creek via the exit raven and trudged off trail across the Tonto Platform for 12 grueling miles. At our lunch stop we called Mike's parents with our satellite phone to find out the results of the election. We were happy with all of the results, so were fueled with elation into our camp at Clear Creek. We were so hot that a bath and laundry in the creek were needed.

Day 9
Now that we were on the trail system again we hoofed it to Phantom Ranch in less than 3 1/2 hours. we met the woman Betty had dropped off earlier on day 1 so had a great chat with her while we ate bagels with cream cheese outside the cantina.

We hiked down to the river, across the Brighty Bridge and up the South Kiabab Trail to a shower. I did the hike up in 3 hours! only 5 minutes behind Mike's best time.

It was a glorious trip, and I checked it off the bucket list.