I’ve just received confirmation of the hiking permit I applied for to explore the Grand Canyon in April of 2015. I’m stoked. The backcountry of the Grand Canyon has become one of my favorite places to go backpacking. For its isolation, beauty, and challenge, there’s nothing better.
Kanab Creek, April 2014
To tide myself through the winter, I’m happy to look back through these photos of our trip from earlier this year. Willie, Colin and I started from the overlook near the Indian Hollow trailhead, and followed a route from George Steck’s guidebook, Grand Canyon Loop Hikes. Our upcoming trip is another chapter from the same book, and will travel through similar terrain, mostly cross-country, in Tuckup Canyon.
This is a video from a backpacking trip I took earlier this year with Colin and Willie. We started from Indian Hollow, on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Willie and I had been on a similar trip organized by Chad in 2011. On this time around, we tried to find the cross-country route through Cranberry Canyon via a landmark called Ghost Rock. Despite our efforts, Ghost Rock lived up to its name. We never did find it, so headed back to the trail and continued onward.
After that, we followed the same route as that earlier trip: southeast to Thunder River, then west to Deer Creek, down the Colorado to Kanab Creek, and north up Kanab Creek, Jumpup Canyon and Indian Hollow, eventually curving east back to our starting point. It’s a week long voyage, mostly cross-country, that traverses all the layers of the canyon from top to bottom to top again. Don’t miss Colin catching a sucker fish with his bare hands, which is known as ‘noodling’. It starts at about 12:10.
