The Great American Road Trip: Day 6

6:30PM
What an amazing/exhausting/terrifying/challenging day! Today we woke up around 4:45AM, not realizing that we had gained another hour with the time change after entering Arizona. (I've never had so little sense of time or day in my entire life...) Anyway, we packed our bags with lots of water, PB&Js (lunch of champions) and as many granola bars as I typically eat in a week at home... and headed off to the Bright Angel Trail that goes down into the Grand Canyon.

I will admit during the initial descent into the canyon I was pretty terrified considering I was wearing my traction-less New Balance sneakers and sliding all over the place. I swear one wrong step and you go hurdling 300 ft down the cliff. Yesterday I saw a sign posted that says not many people fall over the edge of the trail, but those that do- die. They sure know how to ease my fears here at the Grand Canyon. But since I've been initiated as a "bro" on this boys only trip, I didn't really have the option of backing down. And of course, Tyler and Mark wanted to go on the 9.2 mile hike rather than a nice yet challenging 6 mile hike.

So we were walking down into the depths of the Grand Canyon, some of the most beautiful views a girl could ask for and my eyes were glued to the dirk path. And let me tell you there was a lot of dirt. By the end of the hike I looked like I had a bad Lindsay Lohan spray on tan. It was not attractive.

Back to our hike: It took us 3 hours to get down to the Indian Garden level (the second furthest stop on the trail). And while the recommended time allotment to climb back up was twice the amount of time it took you to go down... we made it back up in 3.5 hours. The driving force behind our fast climb was Tyler. He was a speed racer who barely broke a sweat.

His climb approach was more of a sprint and stop approach, while the rest of the climbers seemed to go with the slow and steady approach. We were in competition with this one guy for the last 3 miles of the climb. We would race ahead of him and then while we were catching our breather sitting on some rocks, he would slowly make his way past us. It went on like that for awhile and he continued to come like clockwork, but in the end- we beat him. I think Aesop may need to amend his fable. The hare totally would have won that race in real life.

While I don't have the time to elaborate on this part of the story, I'll just quickly mention that Mark almost didn't make it out of the canyon. His leg started cramping up on the upward climb just as I finished the last sip of my Gatorade, which would probably have done the trick. By the time we had 1.5 miles left to climb, he couldn't bend his leg. It was painful to watch. And after being yelled at for trying to help, Tyler and I trudged on in silence. Tyler sprinted off ahead, while I watched with baited breath as Mark teeter near the edge of the trail.

Thank god we were able to laugh about this later.