With our National Park Quest we have been obsessed with the idea of hiking the Grand Canyon. However, with a bit over 90lbs of weight distributed between Will and I and the weight of extra water, I’ve been leary about our success of getting out of the canyon and enjoying it. So I challenged Will to hike the South Sister. The 11.5 miles round trip hike gains approximately 5000’ which is equivalent to us hiking down the Bright Angel Trail of the Grand Canyon. Will as always agreed to the challenge.
We started late in the day and hiked 2.6 miles up to to Moraine Lake and arrived at about 8pm. I had underestimated how many people would be at the lake and how dark it would be. Each campsite which you can’t see from the trail is situated on top of a hill and after climbing up the hill and back down at least a dozen times we finally found a flat enough (read: not tumbling down slanted) spot to put our tents. We climbed into our tent with few words.
I knew hiking with kids we needed to start early, because we needed to start down by 1pm. We climbed out of our tents with our half filled packs (again bringing our packs to gauge our ability to do the Grand Canyon) and started on the trail to ascend the mountain.
We climbed and climbed and thought we were doing great and it wasn’t too steep, but steep enough that we took a lot of breaks, but we didn’t realize until we crested an incredibly rocky cliff that you couldn’t see past that we hadn’t even started on the tough steep climb yet. When we crested the cliff at the first Glacial Lake we were blasted by wind and saw the rest of the behemoth of shale. I was scared in the moment thinking of how small I was and somehow being blown off the side of the mountain. At that moment I realized I had to climb the mountain and free myself from fear.
As we climbed the switchback scree field, we took two steps forward and slid one step back. My approach to making it to the top was to focus on a rock 20 feet ahead of me and no matter what get there before I rested. Will, who had been having problems before we crested the cliff, focused on taking 10 steps and then taking a 30 second break. This challenged us on time. We had to get to the top before 1, so we could make it down before the weather changed. We just kept ascending at our own pace. Half way up, Will and I dropped our half-filled backpacks and decided we would just pick them up on the way down.
We reached the false summit and I dipped my head into the glacial pond that was there and we reached the summit around 1:30. We didn’t have time for oohs and aahs since my fear of getting down in time pushed us on.
As we came down the mountain, Will and Noah didn’t want to go back down the scree feel, so they hoped onto the glacier and glaciated down the hill! I think Noah at 8 years old is probably the youngest to have done it. I realized how steep and how far we had come as we descended and my toes had blisters on the tips by the end, because of the shear downward angle, but overall I was thankful for the accomplishment.
Will and I both silently agreed we would need to wait another year or two to do the Grand Canyon, so the kids could share a bit more of the weight.
