Grand Canyon
Rim to Rim to Rim
November 2020

I didn’t go to the Grand Canyon to run. I went there to kayak 280 miles of the Colorado River.

But if I was gonna sit on my butt in a kayak for 21 days, I better start sore, having recently done something hard.

I dreaded 3 weeks of stagnancy after a covid-19 year that was wrapping up with me in pretty good shape, but unhappy from a lack of travel and adventure. I feared losing fitness during my planned time on the river, but I feared not going even more. If I could squeeze in a R2R2R run before putting in, I had a feeling I’d be a much happier kayaker.

For the previous six years, I’d been lightly trying to make a R2R2R run happen each November. Climbing, traveling, bikepacking—other things always won my attention. R2R2R seemed to simply sit in the back of my mind as a reserve plan if I was ever physically fit and bored in November. If it stayed in the back of my mind, it would never actually happen. Plus, the Grand Canyon is far from my house in Salt Lake City. If I was going to make the run happen, during my arranged kayaking trip would be the time.

The Rim to Rim to Rim run (or 4-day backpacking trip, or whatever) can be done in a couple of different ways. Having not spent any time below the rim of the Canyon, I chose to run down the South Kaibab trail, up and down North Kaibab, and then back up the Bright Angel trail to the south rim in order to see both of the major trails leading down from the south rim. It added a few extra miles and I ended the day just under 47 miles and just over 11,200 vertical feet of climbing.

I finished at 11 hours even, having started not at the trailed but at the road near North Kaibab and stopping at the outhouse at the top of North Kaibab. I also forgot my jacket and gloves that I’d cached around Phantom Ranch, forcing me to retrace my steps for about a half mile. So that was fun.

My goal was to do the entire run during the daylight hours. But as my girlfriend and I sat in the van at 6:30am, it was just too cold to start running if I didn't want to carry extra layers with me all day after it warmed up. So I started approximately an hour after dawn. And as I crawled my way up the Bright Angel trail ten hours later, approaching my finish at the south rim, I was forced to pull my headlamp out for the final half-hour of climbing. If only I’d started running when it was 25 degrees…

This was a heckuva good first experience seeing the Grand Canyon. Running across it twice in a day made it feel like it wasn’t too massive. But, two days later I’d be putting in for three-week river trip down the same canyon, likely making it feel much, much bigger.