Day 216 (HDT 32)

Day 216 (HDT 32): 26 miles

It was a pretty bad night of sleep up on horseshoe Mesa. It was really windy and it was flapping my tent all night. Around midnight the wind whipped hard and yanked out the stale I had broken the top off of while pounding into the ground last night. I tried to get it back into the ground, but with hard ground, the wind blowing strongly, and me angry, I couldn’t get it in the ground. I just tried to lay a rock on it for a while, but that made even more noise flapping in the wind. So I took off my rain fly around 2-3am. After that it was a little less noisy, but I felt the wind gusts ripping through my tent and it was a little chilly. I didn’t get much good sleep.

After starting the morning with a great PWAV, I started hiking on the Tonto Trail. This once stayed high above the banks of the Colorado which was put of sight nearly all day, hidden below steep cliffs while I walked pretty far inland looping around tributary canyon rims. It wasn’t a lot of elevation gain or loss. It was still beautiful, but it was definitely a little more dull than the constant jaw-dropping views of the past few days.

The wind was howling all day up on the mesas. We would occasionally get a break from it, but it was usually blowing around 20-30mph and gusting around 40-50 probably.

With it being an easier day, not climbing as much we made it to the edge of our permitted camping area, BJ9, pretty early. We got there and had to decide what we were gonna do, camp here, or climb up and put if the canyon on the Kaibab Trail tonight instead of tomorrow morning. While we were deciding, it started hailing, and the wind started to blow around 60mph. The campsites we were looking at were completely exposed on a butte. Everything else was either covered in sharp plants, or in a wash, which I did not want to camp in given how scary the skies looked most of the day.

The weather pretty much made the decision for us. We kept hiking. The hail only fell harder after we started moving again. With the combination of the strong wind, it felt like BB pellets hitting my legs. It stopped after maybe 15 minutes, but it would pretty much alternate heavy rain/hail every 15-30 minutes for the rest of the night.

The trail was kinda faint, combined with the wild weather, me being angry, and listening to heavy metal, led me to get pretty far off the path before reaching the junction with the Kaibab Trail. When I realized I was far off, and basically just had to climb vertically up a mesa, Boom started playing on my earbuds. It fit pretty nicely. I was screaming along with “IS THAT ALL GOT?! Haha!! I’LL TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT!!!” Good try Hayduke, but you can’t keep me down when I got my rock music bangin.

I took a short break at the Tip-off (junction with Kaibab Trail to the South Rim). I queued up an absolute banger of a hard rock playlist to power me up the pretty hellacious climb out of the canyon. I’d say it worked it pretty well and I went pretty sicko mode up to the bathrooms near Cedar Ridge 1.5 miles from the top. I hid out in the bathrooms there for a bit cause it really started to pound hail just before I got there.

I pounded out the rest of the climb up to the South Rim. I met Fancy Feast who changed into a lot of new layers in a privy at the top of the climb from getting soaked on the way up. I decided to deal with it for a little longer till camp.

We made our way to a safe place to sleep with good shelter from the wind. It was gonna be a cold night.

To future Haydukers, the South Rim is not part of the trail and I really would avoid it if possible cause it just forces you to climb out of the canyon an extra time. Ideally I would send a food box to the north rim and just pick it up there so you only have to climb out of the canyon once. But the north rim is closed October 15 until I think May 15th. Also if you were in trouble/wanted to get out of the Grand Canyon, the climb from Horseshoe Mesa to the rim would be the easiest and you really wouldn’t be missing much in that section of the Tonto Trail, from horseshoe Mesa until the Kaibab trail.