Stepping Aside

I lurched along the rim of the Grand Canyon. With each gust of wind, I planted a foot, steadying myself against certain death. I had come to the canyon with its thousand-foot drops to conquer my adult onset fear of heights.

For the sake of disclosure, you should probably know that as I lurched, I was walking the Rim Trail near Mather Point. The trail at this point is flat, paved and, I believe, wheelchair accessible with s-p-a-c-e between the trail and the rim of the canyon. Yet I lurched, certain I would be blown into the canyon. I have never heard of a full-grown man being blown into the canyon, but I am also certain my life is destined to be marked with such ignominy.

My Grand Canyon trip actually began earlier in the day at the Cameron Trading Post where I had a lunch of fry bread and waited for a storm to pass through. Although the rain had let up, when I arrived at the park entrance, clouds and fog enveloped me, hiding the canyon. Yet, as I stepped out of the car, on cue the fog lifted and the clouds parted, giving me my first ever view of the Grand Canyon. It was beautiful, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows, deepening the reds and rusts of the canyon.

If only the beauty of the canyon could have been my first thought, a memory to cherish. Instead, seeing the Grand Canyon, one of the world’s wonders, for the first time in my life, my first thought was a shrug of a thought, “Oh. Doesn’t seem that big.”

That, of course, is the type of thinking that forces park rangers to conduct hundreds of rescue missions each year as people start hiking down into the canyon without water or forgetting that little part about hiking back up the trail. I’ve been on hikes of ten miles or more, but having a healthy respect for a flight of stairs (meaning I get winded), I wasn’t planning to hike down to the river and back up in one day. If you take the Bright Angel trail, that’s nearly 10 miles just to get down to the river, and then 4,000 feet back up, which is way more than the four flights of stairs I avoid back home by taking the elevator to my apartment.When I was planning my trip, I briefly toyed with riding a mule down to the river and back. In addition to a fear of heights, I’m a bit of a nervous passenger. As a passenger in a car, I “steer” with my knees, twisting to the right when the driver gets too close to the center line and to the left when too close to the shoulder. I slam on the brakes constantly and then attempt to cover the action with a pretended stretch. Most drivers eventually ask me to sit in the back, so they don’t have to witness my tortured movements.

I’m bad enough with friends, so the idea of handing control over to a mule didn’t sit well with me. Everything I read, however, said they were safe. And I’m guessing they have more sense than most hikers. So it wasn’t their abilities I doubted, as much as I feared getting the one suicidal mule in the bunch.

Down the trail, up the trail. Day after day after day. Carrying stupid tourists. Then standing before the mule is me: his next tourist, a six-foot tall, 200-pound man (maybe just a tad more than 200 pounds). Rather than just walk off the job, suppose my mule decides to take us both out in a blaze of glory. I don’t know that I could blame him.

In the end I decided I was being foolish if for no other reason than the outfitter’s business model requires a strong safety record. Siding with reason rather than my fears, I started to book a mule trip down the canyon. Started. I didn’t finish the reservation because there was one little problem.

I was over the weight limit. Too fat to ride a mule.

At least my humiliation was conducted privately before a computer screen, rather than at the canyon atop a knee buckling mule. It did make me wonder, though, how many people make reservations according to the weight listed on their driver’s license. Or does the fear of being asked in front of everyone to get off a mule override the instinct to lie about our weight?

Perhaps I should have mastered walking along the Rim Trail without fear before trying other trails, but even for me that felt like too much of a baby step. For my second hike, I had settled on the Bright Angel trail, a mere stone’s throw from my cabin on the south rim of the canyon. I had read up on the trail and thought a three-mile hike down to the rest house would be a good first challenge with its well-maintained trail, tunnels, and switchbacks. The first two tenths of a mile of the trail were described as “not too steep.” 

Once on the Bright Angel trail, I quickly realized the brochure and I had vastly different definitions of steep, not to mention what the brochure left out. Flattened against the wall of the canyon, pretending like I was taking pictures, but in fact too petrified to move, it was not the pitch of the trail I cared about. It was vast nothingness on the side of the trail, which the brochure neglected to mention, that bothered me. Yet hikers and families were oohing and aahing over the views as though death weren’t imminent. (You should probably keep in mind that the trail is wide enough for a mule with room to spare for a hiker to stand off to the side.) I continued to inch my way down the trail, but rather than conquering my fear of heights, it argued back pointing out that every step would have to be repeated on the way up.

To my great relief, a ranger was warning hikers of a storm coming in. I took that as my cue to scramble back up the trail. That imagery suggests an agility that was not present. My ascent was more of a slow crawl with knees shaking, and lungs wheezing and huffing and puffing. Like everyone, I stopped to take pictures, but that was mainly to catch my breath.

I was little more than a mile into the canyon, a thousand feet below the rim, still painfully afraid of heights, when I changed my idea of big.

PATRICK McGRAW is a freelance editor living in his home state of Minnesota. He moved to the East Coast for college and to the West Coast for work. When community teams can hold practices again, he hopes to join the local rugby team - his first time playing!