Phantom Ranch Thanksgiving

Yep, we had Thanksgiving dinner #3 at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was awesome!

 View from the top the day before we hiked. This canyon is to-die-for-beautiful at any time of day, but sunset is spectacular. This view is looking east from the south rim just as the sun was setting.

 We expected the usual fare for the 6:30 dinner (stew, which we love), but no, it was a full-on turkey dinner with all the trimmings including pies of different varieties. Note the mule cut-out on the huge pie. We chose pecan and didn't want to know about the secret ingredient (we're supposed to be on a mission, you know) but it was deeee.licious!

Staying two nights allowed us to hike around the canyon floor the day after Thanksgiving and get our legs ready for the climb out. This shot is from behind Ribbon Falls, heading toward the north rim. Spectacular, and shirt-sleeve weather, too! Check out the size of the prickly pear cactus! I'm 5'4" and it's taller than I am.

We took a chance, prayerfully,  and hiked out on the South Kaibab Trail rather than Bright Angel. I had stumbled a couple of times going down and surprised myself by how hard it was to get upright again. Of course I was carrying 3 liters of water (bad decision) and beating my knees up on that steep trail going down; but it made me worried about the long hike out on Bright Angel, so we opted for the steeper but 3 miles shorter Kaibab. I remembered the many discouraging downhills that the Angel trail has that a hiker has to regain--and how beat I usually am at the end. A number of people told us that they preferred the shorter, steeper route, and we knew that the employees always use Kaibab. It ended up being the best decision! (Prayer works, incidentally.) We just plugged away with only three slightly downhill steps the entire route, so every step counted for something. We were on the shuttle bus back to our car in the early afternoon feeling pretty frisky (until we tried to get out of the car at a gas station, when we realized that we really had hiked over 30 miles in a couple of days). 

A couple of quotes from the canyon:

Definition of a flash flood:  More water than you want coming faster than you can run.

At Cedar Ridge, the first of a couple of restroom stops for hikers hiking into the canyon from Yaki Point: Hikers, remember: Down is optional. Up is mandatory.

At Cedar Ridge, we had a little airshow performed by a fledgling crow, or raven, who swooped right up to us, then turned upside down (Jay says he did an aileron roll) and then back as he flew on, followed by an adult bird of the same variety. So cool!

We detoured through Tuba City where Jay's parents lived for a little while. Bleak, harsh, grim, sad. I wish somehow that the Navajo people had been left alone to live in their cozy hogans and herd their sheep. Trailers, alcohol, big trucks, government hand-outs are a poor substitute. I remember the adobe hogans with yellow light coming from them at night. I know I tend to romanticize the scene from my childhood, but later seeing TV antennas and blue light coming from those same hogans made me sad. Now, you just don't even see hogans on the roads we travel. There are painted wooded homes hogan shaped but in disrepair, but mostly other sorts of buildings. Still, many of the Navajo are true artists, keeping alive their arts. At Jacob Lake, we saw a woven rug made by a woman still alive and in her 90s who traces her sheep back to Bosque Redondo, the Navajo Long Walk of the 1860s. It makes me wonder about the origin of my two rugs. Who made them, and did their sheep's ancestors make that journey, too?

Still visa-waiting. We may be here for Christmas, and that wouldn't be bad.