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It all began in the summer of 1990. I had graduated from UCO in the fall of 1989, a good friend of mine graduated from OSU the year before. As often happens to friends who grew up together, we had already begun to go our separate ways after school. He moved to Fort Worth to work while I remained in Oklahoma City. We decided to do one last thing together, a vacation. In trying to decide where to go, I had always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, he wanted to go see Los Angeles. We decided to do both, in 9 days. I had planned to take my car, but when getting a tune-up and oil change the week before the garage had cracked the oil filter, and when test-driving it after the tune-up managed to blow up my engine. You would have thought that I would have taken this as an omen, but I didn’t.

How not to hike the Grand Canyon

Df
2004-09-13 10:20:36

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Introduction

When I went to pick up the rent-a-car for the trip, it wasn’t ready at 8:00am when we were supposed to leave. After waiting several hours and after some empty promises, we finally rented from another agency. (Omen number 2?) This several hour delay meant that we only made it as far as Grants, NM the first day. Starting the second day, we decided to see the Petrified Forest since we were in the neighborhood.This short hike combined with the awesome views convinced my friend that he could see LA another trip and that more time should be spent seeing the West. When we got to Flagstaff on Sunday night (this is in August) we couldn’t find a room (of course, when hadn’t planned any portion of this trip, we were being spontaneous) so we called some national chain’s 800 numbers. Holiday Inn didn’t have any hotels in Flagstaff but had one room with a lake viewat the Page, AZ resort.So we trekked the 140+ miles up to Page to get our $100 a night room. It was a lake view room. Of course, to view the lake, you had to go out the sliding glass door (we were on the first floor), through the parking lot, around the trash bins, and then through the girders of a power lines tower you could see lake Powell several miles away. (Omen number 3?)

Anyway, this little detour didn’t bother us, as we were enjoying the views, but we were now towards the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, not the South (having not read so much as brochure, we didn’t know the difference). When we got the North Rim Lodge, around 3:00pm on day 3, we tried to get a room. We were number 20 on the waiting list and they ended up with two cancellations. We decided that since we couldn’t get a room, we would just camp instead. At this point in my life, my entire camping equipment list consisted of a $20 dome tent from Wal-Mart, a $30 wool sleeping bag from Target, duct tape, a pocket knife, a 2 D celled waterproof ...