Walking Down The Canyon

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The descent is much harder than the ascent, but you don't know that yet. The novice hiker is leg weary as you near the cottonwood trees of the first oasis, 3,000 ft. below the rim. It's much hotter here than at the trailhead, and you flop down in the shade and briefly commune with Kit Carson and Charles Lindbergh and Sir Edmund Hillary and wonder, "Can I make it back up?" The answer is yes. Absolutely yes. Yes, sir.

On the ascent you have a clear goal ahead, and you get happier and happier as you keep pressing upward, one switchback after another. You overtake other climbers. You feel great. At a trailside shelter you run into teenagers weeping into an emergency phone. Two girls trying to convince a park ranger that they really, really, really, really can't go another step and need to be airlifted out. Two well-fed American girls in nice clothes, both ambulatory. One of them sobs in a well-practiced way, and if you weren't here to see her, you'd think she had crawled for 10 miles through cactus dragging a broken leg behind her. She cries out, "But my dad will pay for it!" They beg. Please, please, please.

You refill your water bottle, and now, feeling more righteous than is good for you, you ascend purposefully and without pause to the rim and accept the silent admiration of the tourists there, who step back to let you pass. And you stride into the lodge and go to your room and shower and put on clean clothes and order a hero-size gin and tonic and sit on the balcony and look out at the canyon blazing red and orange in the sunset, and you feel a moral superiority that only time can diminish. What is a vacation for, if not to make you feel better about yourself?