Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  All fall I ran my trails in reverse: first I ran down the mountains, and then I ran back up, to mimic the Grand Canyon’s topography. Everything about this felt wrong to me. I still clung to the puritanical notion that you have to go uphill first, get the hard part over with, suffer for your rewards, do your homework, and then go out to play.

  Steve was going to join me, but at the last minute he couldn’t go, so I enlisted two running friends: Meaghen, a twenty-five-year-old editor at Outside, and Anna, a disaster relief consultant in her mid-thirties who had a three-year-old daughter. Both were experienced ultrarunners, but neither had been training for the Grand Canyon, so we agreed to start together but then run at our own pace. On the last Friday in October, we left Santa Fe like a bunch of bandits making a getaway, hopped up on lattes and blaring Britney Spears’s “Work B**ch,” giddy with freedom and the anticipation of trading one kind of hard work for another.

  * * *

  —

  Now we stand on the South Rim, peering into blackness. It’s 6 a.m. on October 27, 2013, and only a faint scrim of yellow lines the horizon. Nearly five thousand feet below us, the Colorado River snakes bottle-green and cold between layered rock walls. The temperature is thirty-five degrees, with a light breeze and zero percent chance of rain. Anna and Meaghen and I huddle together, shivering in shorts and thin wind jackets, headlamps bathing our feet in pools of white light. There’s no one here but us. Somewhere across the chasm, the North Rim looms indifferently in the dark. It seems inconceivable that before the day is over, I will run all the way there and back.

  At 6:05 a.m., we drop into the abyss. Even in my headlamp’s beam, the South Kaibab Trail is dark and very narrow and appears deserted, but within minutes we come up hard behind the long, dusty mule train. Our easy lope slows to a brisk, impatient walk. A few hundred feet below us, the wrangler’s scratchy voice drifts out of the twilight. “Don’t get too close to the last mule,” he calls. “We’ll let you pass at the bottom.”

  The last time I saw Gerd, he reassured me, “Don’t worry about the mules. They’ll only be a problem for a minute or two.” Now, though, I can’t help but worry. Which bottom is the mule driver talking about, I wonder uneasily, imagining us eating mule dust for seven miles, all the way to the river. The bottom bottom? I’d wanted to start conservatively, and to use the darkness to keep my speed in check and save my strength for later in the day, but this is too slow.

  After a few switchbacks, though, we come to a widening in the trail and the wrangler whoas the mules. “Go ahead!” he calls to us, and we slide by on the inside and leave them behind in the dusk. The trail is hard-packed sand with some rocks, and we settle into an easy pace. The sky is smudged with pink; soon it’s light enough to see, and we switch off our headlamps and shove them into our packs, stopping now and then to take a few photographs of the sunrise painting the mesas tangerine. It’s hard to overstate the flamboyance of dawn breaking over the Grand Canyon, but I can’t gawk too much, because I have to keep my eyes on the ground. Wooden steps have been hammered across the trail every few feet, presumably to keep the sand—the whole trail, really—from sliding four thousand feet straight down to the river. Eventually I find my rhythm, an exaggerated, hopping gait that becomes less awkward with each step.

  When you fall off the edge of the world, it helps to give in to gravity.

  * * *

  —

  The Grand Canyon is home to the oldest exposed rock on the planet, dating back two billion years. Layer upon layer of sandstone and shale, quartz and limestone tell the story of perpetual change on an almost imperceptible scale. In its various geologic incarnations, the Grand Canyon has been a mountain range, a vast, shallow sea, an arid desert, and shifting sand dunes. In the uppermost layers, you can find shark teeth and mollusk fossils. As wind and water and sun carved away at the strata, volcanic eruptions laid down new layers of sediment. The Colorado River itself is a relatively recent addition, seventy million years ago, sculpting the canyon’s blocky buttes and mesas. Time here is both relentless and outrageously slow; nothing happens in a hurry.

  Last night, in our hotel room on the South Rim, Anna and Meaghen and I spread our map out on the bed. The black line squiggling across the river and up the other side looked so straightforward—just run there and back!—but I knew there would be many immeasurable factors to contend with along the way: heat, hydration, the vagaries of our own bodies, which might get battered by the long descents and climbs. We estimated, conservatively, that it might take us eleven hours, maybe even as little as ten, to cover the forty-two miles and 21,000 feet of vertical gain and loss. Many recreational runners take twelve hours or more; Gerd has power-hiked it in as little as sixteen. My plan was to look at my phone occasionally to check our progress, but to otherwise let go of time and external pressures and do my best to run strong, from within myself. The last thing I want to do is rush.

  In the last text message I got from Steve just before 6 a.m., he wrote, “Don’t worry about your pace. Have fun, and just enjoy where you are.”

  It gets warm as quickly as it gets light, and by the time I reach the Colorado River, the sun is reflecting off the water and I can feel the heat radiating from the rocks. I stand on the Black Bridge, an iron suspension footbridge, feeling it sway and staring at the river sliding soundlessly beneath my feet. I take out my phone, snap a photo. It’s 7:12. A few minutes later, Meaghen arrives, and then Anna.

  At various intervals along the main trails, there are pit toilets and emergency phones and spigots with drinking water. Though we’ll be able to refill our water at the bottom of the canyon and again on the North Rim, I’m carrying all my own food, my pack crammed with Gu, energy chews with extra potassium and sodium, chocolate-covered espresso beans, a couple of dense protein bars, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and a twenty-dollar bill. I don’t plan to run out of food, but in case of emergency I can resupply at Phantom Ranch, where the canteen is rumored to serve the best lemonade in the world.

  On the north side of the bridge, we pause to take off our jackets, refill our water at Bright Angel Campground, duck into a toilet to pee, and eat a couple of gels. Far above us, the North Rim jabs out above the canyon. The North Kaibab Trail is twice as long as the South Kaibab Trail, gaining 5,700 feet in fourteen miles as it climbs gradually along Bright Angel Creek.

  We’ve entered the inner gorge, where the canyon is at its narrowest, where the river is most constricted. Reddish-gray walls slant down on either side of the trail at jagged angles. Streaked with quartz and burnished black in places, the Vishnu schist layer of metamorphic rock is the oldest in the canyon; geologists call this the basement rock. Sitting directly atop the two-billion-year-old schist is a layer of five-hundred-million-year-old sandstone. The missing layers in between are a mystery, 1.5 billion years of strata, of time, unaccounted for, swallowed by a breach in the earth. This gap in the geologic record is known as the Great Unconformity.

  The blackened, ragged schist is older than anything I’ve ever seen. Compared with the rosier tones of the canyon’s upper layers, it appears weary, tormented by time, as though the world has turned itself inside out. I’m turned inside out, too, awed by the canyon and my own body for crossing it, and suffused with a strange joy that feels almost like sadness. Dad has been dead for nearly three years. Where has the time gone? So many bleak months of my own record have gone missing, overlaid by the haste of real life, sliding beneath the surface of motherhood and love. Grief is its own unconformity.

  * * *

  —

  Two months before the R2R2R, Pippa had started kindergarten. On her first day of school, she was up before dawn. “Mama,” she asked, holding up her new school-uniform polo shirt for me to see. “Do the buttons go on the front or the back?”

  I smiled and pointed to her tummy, my eyes stinging. For days I’d been fighting back tears. Life was about to get busier and faster fo
r my wild baby, time no longer our own.

  We biked four blocks to school, and after I left her with her teacher, I hid in the girls’ bathroom and cried some more. She’s not really leaving, I tried to console myself. This is only the beginning. But I didn’t buy it. What an egregious mistake I’d made! All the precious time I’d wasted trying to carve out space for myself! Gone for good in the blink of a five-year-old’s eye.

  I was still teary when I met Natalie a couple of hours later for our walk. “I don’t want her world to be so structured,” I whined on the way down the mountain.

  Ahead of me, Natalie bobbed her head. “You’re sad Pippa started school,” she said simply. “Be in the sadness. Don’t make stories around it.”

  Her words stopped me in mid-stride. I made her say them again.

  “You’re just sad.”

  For a split second I held everything clearly in my mind, all the jumbled pieces organizing themselves into a neat bundle: The sorrow I’d felt as a girl was so big, it seemed as though it would swallow me if I let it. Instead I’d made up tales and suppositions, trying to crack the case, even when sometimes there were no answers, or the answers I found only led to other questions. “More explanations later,” I’d written in my spy book. I was still looking.

  Maybe the answer had been in front of me all along. Maybe I’d just been sad. And maybe that’s what growing up means: You don’t have to believe all your own stories anymore. You get to choose.

  The idea, like so much of what came out of Natalie’s mouth, was so slight and yet far too big to grasp all at once. It took the top of my head right off. All I could do was keep walking.

  That afternoon, Pippa and I rode our bikes home from school. The sun was high, and the late-summer storm clouds had pushed east over the plains. The waxing moon hung sideways above us.

  “Mama,” Pippa said, pointing to the sky. “How do astronauts land on the moon when it’s so skinny?” I could see her five-year-old mind-wheel spinning, and I could see what she saw: bitty, bubble-headed space travelers misjudging their lunar landing and clinging to the narrow arc of the moon, space boots dangling off one side. They plant their flag in the swinging swoop of real estate and hold on for dear life.

  * * *

  —

  The North Kaibab Trail rolls gradually upward through the box canyon from the Colorado River, crossing Bright Angel Creek atop narrow wooden bridges, for seven miles to Cottonwood Campground. Liberated from the awkward cadence of the descent, I lengthen my stride and relax into a steady clip, pulling ahead of Meaghen and Anna. For a few moments I hear their voices behind me, but then all is silent and I’m alone on the trail.

  At Cottonwood, I fill up on water from the spigot and dash into the outhouse. From here the trail begins to climb in earnest to the North Rim. I’ve been in the shade all morning, but above Roaring Springs waterfall, I leave the shadows and cross into the glaring desert sun. I pass cottonwoods blazing gold along the creek and meadows of silver-green agave, some shooting their blooms skyward. I part waist-high swaying grasses, hop lizards, catch up to groups of runners who left the South Rim before us, and try to outrun swarms of flies. A wiry man with grasshopper legs and a tiny pack strides past me and disappears around a bend.

  In the last four miles to the North Rim, there are several long sections where the trail is bound on one side by massive cliffs of redwall limestone rising straight up and on the other by thousands of feet of sheer drop-off. There are no guardrails or barriers, just empty air and, far below the cliff’s edge, rock and more rock. The trail is maybe three feet wide. I creep slowly along with my hand on the wall, trying not to look down.

  Around a bend I see Gerd coming toward me. His plan had been to start from the South Rim at 2 a.m. Now he’s on his way back down. I can tell it’s him by his black knee braces and his starchy, long-legged gait. We stop to chat for a few moments, and he bends down on one knee along the edge to show me where the trail washed away several years ago in a storm. He was on the North Kaibab that day, in late November; it was icy, and he had to cling to the side and pull himself up, which he reenacts dramatically with a jolly, mustached grin.

  “But go, go!” he says, waving me on. “You are rocking it!”

  I tuck in for the final push. Though steep, the switchbacks on North Kaibab make the trail fairly runnable. Within an hour, I’m jogging through a tunnel of ponderosas to the top of the North Rim. The North Kaibab trailhead is wedged into a side canyon, so the panorama isn’t nearly as spectacular as from the South Rim. The anticlimax is okay, though, because all I really want to do is eat, fish some pebbles out of my right shoe that have been chafing my toes, refill my water, and be on my way.

  The problem is, there is no water. According to ranger reports, the tap is supposed to remain turned on until the end of October, when the winter season officially arrives on the North Rim, but it’s already shut off. This I learn from Grasshopper Legs, who’s sitting on a bench, waiting for his friends. He introduces himself as Chris Vargo, an up-and-coming pro runner from Colorado Springs. In recent years, the R2R2R has become a proving ground for elite trail runners trying to break the fastest known time, or FKT, for the double crossing. The current men’s FKT is 6:21:47, set by Rob Krar; the women’s record belongs to Bethany Lewis, in 8:15:51. (Both records would stand until in 2017.)

  I lean against a signpost and take off my shoes and socks. A backpacker approaches us and nods approvingly. “Halftime!” he calls. Though we’ve just finished the longest climb of the day, we’re only halfway there. Now I have to turn around and run twenty-one miles back the way I came.

  Nearby, a runner is sitting on the ground with his head in his hands, moaning.

  “Are you okay?” I ask him.

  “I’m dehydrated. I thought there would be water here,” he says glumly.

  My hydration pouch is nearly empty, too, but I hand him a salt tab and Chris pours water into his bottle.

  “Good luck, man,” Chris says.

  I ask Chris to take my picture, wolf down an energy waffle, and check my phone. It’s 10:45. Eight minutes after I arrived at the North Rim, I begin the long run back to the river.

  In the first mile, I take inventory. My legs still feel solid and not particularly tired, the blistery patch on my foot seems to be gone, my fingers aren’t too swollen from dehydration, my stomach is full of Gu, and I still have plenty of battery life left in my iPod. I let my stride lengthen and loosen, and soon I feel like I’m levitating, my feet barely skimming the ground. I pass now familiar landmarks—the crumbling section of trail where a ranger had fixed a rope and the water faucet near Supai Tunnel, where I’d spaced out and lost the trail for a few moments, wandering into a patch of prickers before realizing my mistake. When I stop and refill my water, I see a woman hiker I recognize from earlier. “Are you Katie from Santa Fe?” she asks. I nod and she says, “Your friends told me to tell you that they turned around at Cottonwood.” Any hope I had of meeting up with Anna and Meaghen is gone, but there are plenty of other runners—flocks of them now—making the long climb up to the North Rim, some walking, some jogging.

  Sometimes I whoop when I run. I do it spontaneously, without thinking. I whoop when I’m short of breath, to regulate my breathing. I whoop when I’m alone and scared, to warn off animals, to blow off nervous energy and to hear the sound of my own voice. But mostly I whoop when I’m so happy I can’t keep it in, like now. I hoot as I pass other runners, and they hoot back, pumping their fists in the air.

  Below Cottonwood Campground, I round a corner and see Gerd ahead of me, striding back to the river. I’ve caught up to him sooner than we both expected, and I holler his name. He turns and waves me on, shouting as I go by, “You look like a feather!”

  Then I’m back in the basement of the canyon, where the trail narrows and becomes rougher underfoot. Beside Bright Angel Creek, flinging itself toward its confl
uence with the Colorado River, someone has balanced a few pointy rocks on end. Above me, the Vishnu schist slants into the inner gorge. The rock is so ancient, it has seen everything in the world. It is impartial to happiness and pain, to success or failure. To time itself. I could be anything in this canyon and it wouldn’t matter. We are tiny and new, brief flashing dots on the landscape, infinitesimal and infinite. This is true freedom. This is why I’ve come. This is why I run.

  * * *

  —

  Down to the Colorado again, past workers doing laundry at Phantom Ranch, for a quick pit stop at the toilet and faucet. Seven miles and 4,700 feet above me, the South Rim hovers like another planet, so many layers still between me and it. I check my phone. It’s 1:10 p.m.

  Up on the North Rim, it was a comfortable seventy degrees, but five thousand feet lower, it’s closer to eighty-five. I’m flushed and sweaty, and the heat is oppressive. There’s no way I’m going to run by the river without getting into it. I detour a couple hundred yards off the main trail to a crescent beach that doubles as a boat launch for whitewater rafts.

  I ignore the sign that says NO SWIMMING—DANGEROUS CURRENTS, take off my shoes and pack and shirt, and wade into the eddy past my ankles. The water is invigorating—fifty degrees, straight out of the bottom of Glen Canyon Dam, a hundred miles upstream. I splash it over my face, arms, legs, and bare stomach, cooled by the current that formed the canyon, and keep running, straight into the jaws of the climb. The South Kaibab is relentlessly steep right away, with sandy switchbacks and those dreaded wooden steps. Nothing to do but dig in and run. The Colorado drops away quickly, and soon I can see the river only in pieces, slivers of frothing whitewater on its way to someplace else.

  I pass in and out of shadows cast by the steep walls. Ravens circle above me, and a breeze riffles my skin. I’ve been drinking warm grape-flavored electrolytes all day, but the thought of taking another sip makes me want to barf. All I want right now is plain, ice-cold water. I open my mouth to let the air blow in. I’m so thirsty I could drink the wind. I think I remember seeing a faucet at the Tonto Trail junction, a couple of miles uphill, and I spend many minutes fantasizing about turning it on, lying on the ground, and letting it wash over me. But when I get there, there is no tap, so I take a long swig from my nozzle and jog on.