October 11-12, 2002 – 42 miles
I did a nice return trip through Paria Canyon with brother-in-law Ed Johnson. We drove down Thursday night and spent the night at a motel in Kanab. We woke up early and arrived at the White House trailhead at about 6:00 a.m. I almost ran over a guy sleeping in the parking lot next to his car. Pretty stupid of him. As I was loading up my camelback with Gatorade, I spilled it all over in my daypack, so the whole hike I would have wet, sticky stuff.
We were off. What a blast. We started in the dark and had to figure out which way the river was flowing in order to make sure we were heading in the right direction. It didn’t take us long to get used to hiking in water. As the sun rose, we kicked it into gear and I put on the tunes to help me keep up with Ed. At the Confluence, we met other hikers who were on their second day…and we were on our second hour! They were amazed to see us running with daypacks and probably thought we were crazy. We took a short hike up Buckskin Gulch and then we were on our way again.
After about 15 miles, I could feel that I was getting tired, but we pressed on. My left leg was painful and I was afraid that I would pull the hamstring more. The canyon was stunning. As we reached about 20 miles, we started to pass a few people who were on their 3rd day. Amazing! It was still early afternoon on our first day. At 22 miles, we stopped, unloaded and rested for an hour or so. I discovered that I wrecked all my CDs with sand…bummer. We then took a hike up to Wrathler Arch through a very pretty canyon. When we returned, we realized that we should probably go find water, because it would be hard to find early in the morning in the dark. So we continued on, found a spring, loaded up, and then found a place to spend the night at about the 25-mile mark. We pigged out on stuff, including summer sausage, crackers, and cheese. When the sun went down, there wasn’t much else to do, so we went to sleep. I had a lightweight Biva sack that worked great, except I woke up about 2 a.m. dripping in sweat.
At about 3:30 a.m., we were both awake and decided to break camp and get going. It was a wild experience hiking the river in the dark. We made dozens of crossing, dipping a foot in the water to try to figure out how deep it was. We would laugh when it was only ankle deep in places we thought was much deeper. We traveled through the most technical parts of the whole hike in the dark with our headlamps!
The bad news was that my legs were in serious trouble. My hamstring was no longer a problem at all, but both knees hurt bad with every step. I also had bad shin splints in both shins. I tried and tried to stretch them out, but it was too late. At about 5:30 a.m., I just couldn’t bear it any more and we stopped to rest and wait for the sun to rise. We continued on and I felt a little better, but still in great pain. I felt best if I could do a slow jog, so I tried to keep up that pace. The sun rose and it warmed up nicely. The landscape changed and the valley opened up. Sometimes we hiked in the river, other times we hiked along the high water mark trails. We covered about 17 miles. The last five miles were brutal for me. I kept up the jog, but every time we had to descend to cross the river it felt like I had knives in my knees. At about noon, we arrived at Lee’s Ferry…42 miles in a day and six hours! Wow! It was a fantastic hike and I really enjoyed Ed’s company. I had wanted to do this hike again for ten years. Our total hiking time was only 17 hours!
Next, we needed to hitch a ride back around to our car, about 150 miles. At Lee’s Ferry we asked some hikers to give us a lift to the main road and they did. The van was disgusting. We sat in the back with some dogs, but we were very happy to have a ride. They dumped us off and we immediately were picked up by a couple young Navajo’s. They had disgusting language, but we were glad to get to Page. My camelback leaked in their car and I left a big wet spot on their back seat. At Page we pigged out at Burger King. We called home to make sure our families knew were survived.
We thought hitching a ride the rest of the way would be easy, but it took us 45 minutes before a couple kids picked us up and took us 5 miles to Waweep. Then it took another 45 minutes to get our next ride. Ed tried all sorts of tactics: holding out money, pretending to be out of water, waving, etc. Finally a guy let us ride in the back of his truck. He took us to the Paria BLM office. Ed ran a couple miles to the campground to get the car.
My body damage was somewhat significant. It turned out that I developed Iliotibial Band Syndrome (ITBS) in my knee. It put me on the sidelines for more than a month. I couldn’t try any running for two weeks. I had a very bad shin splint (Medial Tibia Stress Syndrome) in my right leg that took over a week to heal. Frustrated and feeling like I was getting out of shape, I decided to take up swimming in the weeks to come. Our housing development has a great heated pool that I swim in before work. Within three weeks I was able to swim a mile without stopping. I quickly gained the reputation in my housing development as the “power swimmer.” Little did they know that I only had been swimming for a few weeks. The last time I had done any serious swimming was 32 years earlier.