I hadn’t intended to drive for 16 hours. It’s around midnight and my friend and I are about two hours away from Bright Angel Lodge at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I pull over for gas, to stretch my legs, and wake myself up. 

“Can you drive for a couple hours?” I ask.

“Oh yeah.” He replies.

I finish filling the tank. He sprints back and forth across the parking lot.

We get back on the road.

Nine months earlier we’d been catching up in the kitchen at a friend’s birthday party. I’d been inspired to hike the Grand Canyon by reading Kevin Fedarko’s book, A Walk in the Park. 

I hadn’t been on an overnight backpacking trip in more than 30 years. I’d never been to the Grand Canyon. I’d only seen it from the window of a plane at 30 thousand feet en route to and from work in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Somewhat spur of the moment during our kitchen conversation I said, “I’m going to go hike the Grand Canyon next summer.” Other than telling my wife I wanted to do it, I hadn’t said a word about it to anyone. Verbalizing this to my friend was a way of making myself accountable for it, a way for me to commit to something I really wanted to do.

My friend enthusiastically asked if he could join. He’s one of my oldest and best friends, I knew he was serious. “Of course,” I replied. And that was it. 

The next day I sent him a text:

We both spent time watching Grand Canyon hikers on YouTube. We started training, researching gear, nutrition, and hydration. We hadn’t won the lottery yet, but we decided if we didn’t pull a permit for the Grand Canyon, we’d find something else to do during the same time frame.

December came around and I entered the backcountry permit lottery. We didn’t win. We entered into the secondary, which might give us a chance if any of the primary winners backed out. Apparently they didn’t. We talked about June. The temperatures would be hot, but we thought we could handle it. We’d have time to get heat acclimated during our late stage training.

I entered the June lottery in January. And we won. Not only did we pull a backcountry permit, we were able to pull permits for each of the campgrounds we wanted — Mather, North Rim, Cottonwood, Bright Angel, and Havasupai Gardens. We even managed to get dinner and breakfast reservations at Phantom Ranch. We would find out later why we were so lucky.

I won’t say the logistics of hiking rim-to-rim at the Grand Canyon are difficult, but they are involved. There’s travel to the Canyon, an 18 hour drive in our case. Finding a place to stay when you get there. We opted for Mather Campground at the South Rim where an elk walked through our campground. Due to our arrival in the middle of the night, we also “slept” in the car for a few hours.

Then you have to arrange for a shuttle, either before or after your hike through the Canyon. We opted to leave our car at the South Rim and used the Trans Canyon Shuttle to get to the North Rim. The shuttle takes about four hours from the South Rim to the North Rim. It drops off hikers between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m., which was too late in the day to start hiking in the June heat. So you may need a place to stay once you get to the North Rim. We camped at the North Rim campground and started our hike at 4 a.m. the next morning.

More on that in a future post.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from trustedsignal authored by davehull. Read the original post at: https://trustedsignal.blogspot.com/2025/10/grand-canyon-rim-to-rim-1-of-n.html