Many things really surprised me during this hike of the Grand Canyon on the Havasupai Indian Reservation.
- How natural it felt having my backpack on the second day.
- How quickly my body recovered after a really long hike.
- How amazingly beautiful it was, some I didn’t realize until sitting on my couch back home and glancing through the photos.
I guess I should begin at, well, the beginning. One thing I would really recommend no matter what: they do NOT have running water at the rim. We could of sworn that we read on the website that they had running water, but they don’t. Sadly we had to mooch some off of the fellow hikers and they were very kind, they wouldn’t even take the money we offered in exchange. They do have a pretty good sized parking lot at the very top, with a permanent port-a-potty that may or may not have toilet paper and sanitizer. The parking lot also
has a couple fenced off sections were they keep the mules during the day, while we were there a couple of groups used that section to camp in. We decided to sleep in the back of our rented vehicle.
The hike took a lot longer then we anticipated, not arriving into the camp ground until 4 o’clock or so. We would highly recommend bringing water and make sure that you have some kind of map so that you could pace yourself, or at least know how much further. About half way down, we started running into people hiking back out, 9 out of 10 times we asked people how much further or what we should anticipate they all responded “almost there”. This being our first real hike, we didn’t fully comprehend what their definition of “almost there” was, in this case it meant hours not minutes.
We also found out that taking a helicopter out of the park was cheaper then riding the mules. You just have to show up on a day that they are flying, put your name on a sheet before two and you have a flight out of there. During March riding a mule cost about 93$ per person, plus another mule to carry your packs, where as taking the helicopter was 85$ per person and that included our packs. We decided to take the helicopter flight and boy were we excited to leave. Not saying that we didn’t like the Grand Canyon, it was beautiful.
By not understanding that there was no running water on the rim, we had become dehydrated during the hike and we had a serious lack of confidence in our ability to hike back out of the Canyon. Looking back on the whole experience from the comfort of my couch, I would hike the Grand Canyon Havasupai Indian Reservation again but take less food and more water. I would also like to say I would want to hike back out, but again that’s coming from me while in the comfort of my home. Also I would recommend taking some compost-able toilet paper as the bathrooms don’t always have toilet paper and also some sanitizer as they don’t always have that either.
