Without Baggage

A surreal, Native American dream

Hank Leukart — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

A surreal, Native American dream.

Tracking down vanished Indians in Mesa Verde National Park and Monument Valley.

This is the final essay in a series about trying to relive my middle school's "Indian Unit" on an Indian ruins road trip through the American Southwest. Start with the first essay for the whole story.

MONUMENT VALLEY NAVAJO TRIBAL PARK, Utah — Drained from our snowball fight, Rich, Wendy, Vik, and I go to search for a place to eat in nearby Cortez. Almost all of the town's restaurants are closed because it's the afternoon of the Super Bowl and the blizzard has buried the roads in six inches of snow. Eventually, a sign reading "Big D's BBQ," outside a dilapidated building that looks like it might be the town jail, catches Rich's eye, and he pulls the car into the parking lot.

"Really?" I ask.

"Local color," he says.

We walk through a door labeled "Saloon" and discover that we're some of the few non-Navajos inside a grungy dive bar. No one is eating any food.

"Where's the barbecue?" I ask the bartender.

"Oh, the restaurant has been closed for months," he tells me. "But we're having a Super Bowl party right now; if you hang out to watch the game, you can enter our raffle to win a grill, and we're having a free buffet with Navajo tacos at halftime."

We never turn down free Navajo tacos. Or, we never have before, since we have no idea what they are.

We're gulping down glasses of Fat Tire and shoving Navajo tacos — which turn out to be traditional Native American frybread smothered in chili — into our mouths when, without warning, a shoe flies across the room, almost hitting Wendy in the head. We all turn around just in time to see a drunk woman grab a glass from the bar and chuck it as hard as she can at her boyfriend. It smashes into his chest with a loud thud, then clatters onto the floor. Apparently the shoe was meant for him as well.

"I think this local color may be our cue to leave," Vik says, ducking under the table.

We hurry out of the bar, and after stopping at a store to buy more beer and a deck of cards, we pull into the parking lot of the Tomahawk Motel — which looks a lot like a snowboarding mogul park, due to the storm. Everyone waits in the car as I visit the motel's office, where I see an enormous Great Dane, larger than me, sitting behind the desk.

"Are you the owner?" I ask the dog.

"I am," the dog says. Actually, the voice turns out to be coming from a man who appears from a back room behind the human-sized canine.

"It's cold out there, huh?" I say. The colossal dog looks at me suspiciously.

"Not really," he says in a distinctly Scandanavian accent. The motel owner. Not the dog.

"Yeah, I guess you're used to this," I respond. "But that's a lot of snow out there, huh?"

"Not really," the owner says. Then, he rolls his eyes. The dog, I mean.

"Where are you from?" I ask.

"Here," the owner says flatly. I give up.

I hand some money to the Great Dane, and then Rich, Wendy, Vik, and I move into our room at the Tomahawk Motel, waiting out Snowpocalypse 2010, drinking beer and playing Spades.

"Maybe I'll never have to go back to work," Wendy says hopefully. "Maybe the Snowpocalypse will trap us with oversized Great Danes in the Tomahawk Motel forever."

But the next morning, snowplows have cleared the roads. I call Mesa Verde National Park on the phone, and a Ranger tells me that they're open for business.

We meet Ranger Craig in the Park, who we're pretty sure either smoked something illegal before arriving or is so entranced by his own Native American spirituality sermons that he can make himself high on demand. We're disappointed to learn that beyond the normal winter-season closures of the Balcony House and Cliff Palace ruins sites, the Mesa Top Loop Road ruins viewpoints are closed because of the Snowpocalypse. But when Craig leads us down the Spruce Tree House path, past a forest of trees coated in white flakes, under a cliff blanketed with snow, to an expansive palace of ancient Anasazi homes, Mesa Verde feels like a dream.

Craig adeptly takes over my role as middle school teacher. He pulls us all aside, away from the ruins, and tells us that the information he's telling us is too sacred to discuss among the Puebloan homes. He tells us about Native American human remains that the Park reburied in a secret ritual in 2006. He tells us that some archeologists believe that the huge room hidden behind the palace served as a space for parties and dances, while others believe it may have been used for mysterious sacraments. He tells us about religious rituals that the Anasazi performed in kivas, round, underground rooms used for spiritual ceremonies.

"You know that famous pictograph of Kokopelli, the Indian fertility deity, innocently playing a flute?" Craig asks. "That's not a flute." His wink and hand motion indicate that he's referring to self-fellatio.

"You don't get this info on the summer tour," he says mischievously.

I pinch myself to try to wake myself up.

"He's totally and completely high," Wendy whispers to me. But I realize that this is probably my only chance to find out the answer to the biggest mystery of all.

"Can you tell us why the Anasazi left this place and disappeared?" I ask. I hope that maybe Craig will finally provide us with an answer, even if it's drug-induced. He looks me right in the eye.

"No one knows," he says mysteriously. He winks again. I stare at the sprawling cliff dwelling, disappointed.

After our tour, Rich chauffeurs us toward our final stop, Utah's Monument Valley, a collection of sandstone buttes on Navajo land so stunningly beautiful that they have been used in hundreds of films, television shows, and car commercials. A dirt road in the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park lets adventurous drivers with high-clearance vehicles maneuver amongst the towering rock formations. But after traveling about a mile on the road, we reach a point at which the road surface has broken off. A small river flows in front of us, and deep mud is everywhere. Rich stops the car. We all look out of the front windshield at the fantastic rock formations of Monument Valley and the water blocking our way. Rich stares at the water. Wendy stares at the water. Vik stares at the water. We're all silent. We sit there, motionless, for five minutes.

In my head, I'm screaming, "OMG. JUST DRIVE DOWN THE ROAD ALREADY!" but I'm not saying anything aloud, because I don't want to be blamed when the car (owned by Rich and Wendy) gets stuck in a foot of mud and its transmission falls off. Rich is hesitant to take a risk. Vik's primary concern is getting back to Los Angeles and his girlfriend, alive. Even adventurous Wendy's number one priority is to protect the integrity of her car. We're gridlocked.

"Hello," an unexpected, gentle voice says through the front passenger's window. "You can make it." I see an old Navajo man with a ponytail and deep lines crisscrossing his aged face outside the car. This can't be happening, I think. How long can this surreal Native American dream go on?

"Are you sure our car won't get stuck?" Rich says.

"I'm sure," the Navajo man says calmly.

"What if you're wrong?" Rich asks him.

"I'll save you," he says in his soothing tone. Then, he gets into a nearby white van and drives away.

I'm about to ask everyone, half sarcastically and half seriously, whether they saw the Navajo man too, when Rich — the same guy who stayed behind while Wendy and I hiked along the perilous rim of Sycamore Canyon to the ruins — abruptly shifts the transmission into first gear and smashes down the accelerator. Mud flies everywhere, splattering the car's windows. Wendy screams. Vik and I cheer and clap. My head hits the roof as the car hurls and bounces across the river in the road. Before we know it, we're on the other side of the water, navigating through a half-foot of mud toward the magnificent Mitten Buttes. There, in Monument Valley, an enigmatic Navajo man somehow managed to give Rich the gift of courage.

As the sun sets, Rich continues to steer the car through the mud, weaving in out of the Valley's towering buttes and plateaus. The golden sunlight reflecting off the red rock formations looks like a painting gifted to us by a higher power. The four of us get out of our car to soak in the panorama.

I realize that Monument Valley is our big finale. It's our Grand River Day. I wish my middle school teachers were with us to see our fantastically improved "Indian Unit," though I'm afraid they might be disappointed that I never solved the mystery of the vanished Native Americans.

And then — and I promise I'm not making this up — a white and brown horse unexpectedly wanders into the road and stops in front of our car. I stare at it. Images from our trip flash through my head. I think of the wolfcow and shiny stallion from Sycamore Canyon, the oversized Great Dane from Cortez, and the mysterious Navajo man in Monument Valley who removed all of Rich's anxieties. I try to make sense of them all.

Look, I'm not saying that the Hohokam, the Anasazi, and the Sinagua who disappeared from the Four Corners region 700 years ago became benevolent Navajo skinwalkers, appearing as cowwolves, horses, dogs, and old Native American guides, helping visitors to the area. That would be ridiculous.

But I don't have any other explanation. And neither does anyone else.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This essay, A surreal, Native American dream, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Snowpocalypse!

Hank Leukart — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

Snowpocalypse!

A blizzard interrupts a visit to Canyon de Chelly National Monument.

This is the third essay in a series about trying to relive my middle school's "Indian Unit" on an Indian ruins road trip through the American Southwest. Read the first and second essay for the whole story.

SOMEWHERE NEAR CORTEZ, Colorado — We spend the next two days on a whirlwind tour of Indian ruins sites managed by the National Park Service. First, we hurry to nearby Montezuma Castle National Monument, an impressive Sinagua 20-room cliff dwelling overlooking the Verde Valley. We learn that the Europeans who discovered the Sinagua ruins in the 1860s assumed incorrectly that the ruins had been constructed by Montezuma and the Aztecs, and the Monument's name is a misnomer. We start calling the ruins "Montezuma Castle (No Relation.)"

"I feel like a tourist," Rich says disappointedly. We're all staring at a National Park diorama depicting a scene of Sinagua living in the cliff dwelling, complete with a blind man being led around by his wife and a misbehaved child running around on a mud roof. The diorama's "Audio-Program" sign and activation button looks like it time traveled to us from 1950.

I, too, feel less like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark and more like Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's Vacation. It's significantly more rewarding finding ruins hidden on the rim of an obscure Canyon than visiting a castle and diorama at the end of a path paved by the National Park Service. Montezuma Castle (No Relation) seems like moose stew made with grocery store beef.

We catapult ourselves during the night toward northeastern Arizona's Canyon de Chelly National Monument, and at 7 AM, we begin hiking into the Canyon on the White House Ruins Trail. Unfortunately, it's the only trail visitors are permitted to hike without paying a Navajo guide, due to a special arrangement between the Park Service and the Navajo Nation. Though the temperature is below freezing, we take our time enjoying the Canyon's fantastic scenery: towering red rock mesas, mint-colored Cottonwood trees, snow covered valleys, and buttes made of stretched orange sandstone. There's some not-so-attractive scenery too. At the bottom of the Canyon, we pass a pile of trash, lawn chairs, and jeep tracks left by previous tourists before we arrive at the White House Ruins. The chain link fence that keeps us far from the cliff dwelling punishes us for the misdeeds of our looting ancestors in 1900.

"The Anasazi built these cliff dwellings in the Canyon between AD 700 to 1200. Then, they mysteriously disappeared," I, in middle-school-teacher mode, tell the group.

"Yes, yes, we know," Wendy says. "But where the hell did they go?"

Kids today, I think.

We stand at the fence, staring at the ruins. My eyes run over the aging, cracked red rock and the dwelling's strangely small windows. I see a few pictographs etched into the rock: one that looks like an alien wearing a condom on his head, and another that looks like a planet from another galaxy. I wonder whether the Anasazi were abducted by strange, condom-wearing aliens or were in fact aliens themselves. I don't share any of my absurd theories with the group.

As we hike back to the Canyon's rim, snow starts to fall. The oversized, cottony flakes come slowly at first, sprinkling our clothes and eyelashes. The air turns quiet, in the way that it always does during heavy snowfalls, and the sky and air become white and opaque. By the time we're near the top of the Canyon, we're walking through a full-fledged snowstorm.

"That may have been one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen," Vik says about the storm as the four of us, covered in snow, pile back into the car.

By the time we get to the entrance to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, we've been driving through what seems like an enormous bale of cotton for six hours. I learn from my iPhone that the media is calling the storm Snowpocalypse 2010. We're surprised to encounter a closed, locked gate, and a Park Ranger stops us when we try to drive around it.

"The Park's closed," he explains. "Too much snow." Doesn't he know that we're trying to fit a ten day road trip into four days, and we only have one day left to find out what happened to the Native Americans of the Four Corners? I think. He tells us that, if we're lucky, the Park may open again the next morning.

"Quickly — to Hovenweep!" I urge my travel companions, hoping that we can squeeze yet another ruins site into our trip. As Rich drives away, Wendy programs the car's GPS navigator to direct us to Hovenweep National Monument, the site of six prehistoric, Puebloan-era villages. Forty five minutes later, we find ourselves driving through rural prairies, near the intersection of Road P and Road 18, somewhere not at all close to Arrida, Colorado — which is to say — nowhere. In every direction, we see seemingly infinite swaths of snow fields. The blizzard, which had let up temporarily, starts again, slowly at first, then intensifies. We see no Puebloan villages. The snow makes me wonder whether the Hohokam, the Anasazi, and the Sinagua fled the area simply because they couldn't handle the cold and crazy snowstorms. The car's GPS navigator appears to have tired of sending us to the ruins of ancient civilizations. We're lost. Rich stops the car on the side of the road.

"Snowhere," Rich says. "We're Snowhere." Without explanation, he steps out of the car and starts walking slowly across one of the snow fields. Vik then gets out of the car too and follows him, about fifty feet behind. As Wendy and I watch, Vik bends down, builds a snowball in his hands, and pelts Rich in the back with it. When Wendy and I get out of the car, she too grabs some snow from the side of the road and then throws it at Vik when he's not looking. I, the eternal travel documentarian, take photos until thousands of falling snow flakes render my camera inoperable. I pack it away, join the group, and start throwing snowballs at Rich.

Orbs of snow and ice fly chaotically through the air. One smashes into Rich's shoulder. Vik's jeans soon become soaked with snow. Wendy's snowball weapons become the size of human heads. One bombards me in the neck.

My middle school teachers never would have allowed this, I think.

It's an all-out snowmageddon. We never make it to Hovenweep.

Read the final essay in this series, in which a woman throws a shoe and a bar glass at Hank and his friends.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This essay, Snowpocalypse!, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Becoming Indiana Jones

Hank Leukart — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

Becoming Indiana Jones.

Discovering ancient Indian ruins on the steep rim of Arizona's Sycamore Canyon.

This is the second essay in a series about trying to relive my middle school's "Indian Unit" on an Indian ruins road trip through the American Southwest. Read the first essay for the whole story.

PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST, Arizona — After sleeping in on the first morning of our Indian ruins road trip, I wake up confused, trying to remember if the wolfcow and white horse from the night before actually existed or were simply images from a dream. Wendy, Rich, Vik, and I repack our backpacks and begin hiking the fourteen mile trip toward Verde Hohokam cliff-dwelling ruins purportedly hidden high on a ridge in the Arizona wilderness. As we make our way up steep Sycamore Canyon toward flat Packard Mesa, Wendy says that she can't believe that the Verde Hohokam would build their homes so far from everything. But as soon as she says it, we realize together that that in the Verde Hohokam's world, one without roads, cars, and maps, there was no concept of "everything." The cliff dwelling we're hiking toward was probably as close to "everything" as anywhere.

Quickly, we find ourselves off-trail (due to a sketchy path and a vague description in our trail guide), and we hike through a dangerous obstacle course of cacti that we dub "Cactus Pass." As we search for the trail, I slip and fall onto a purple cactus, which gleefully deposits a bunch of spines in my leg that feel like burning needles. I'm embarrassed when we're forced to bring the hike to a halt so that Wendy can use tweezers to remove a bunch of particularly painful spines from my thigh. But soon, we're scaling 500 feet up a ridge toward what we think is the location of the cliff dwelling. When we reach the top of one side of the Canyon's rim, we walk toward the supposed GPS coordinates of the ruins, only to find that we're blocked by a cliff and a 1,000 foot drop below us. We don't see any ruins. As the sun begins to set, I realize why my middle school teachers chose a safe, local state park for Grand River Day.

"I know we're very, very close!" I insist, hoping we can continue in the dark. Wendy takes the role of a responsible teacher and reminds us that we can continue searching again in the morning.

Unable to sleep after setting up camp, I spend an hour in my tent studying the topographical map on my GPS device and realize that the ruins' actual site is located high up on the steep face of the Canyon lip opposite the one on which we're camped. I decide that we're going to have to shuffle our way around the precarious Canyon's edge to get there. At sunrise, we begin hiking again, precariously making our way around the rim, inching slowly toward what we believe to be the site of the ruins, hidden behind a curve in the rock and a towering plateau. The climbing over crumbling red sandstone and dangerous cacti as we snake our way around becomes too perilous for Rich and Vik, and they decide to stay behind. But Wendy and I continue on, eventually dropping our packs to creep forward more easily.

"We're totally like Indiana Jones!" I yell right before embarrassing myself again by falling, this time palm-first, on top of another purple cactus. When I look at my hand, impaled by about twenty cactus spines, I start to grow skeptical that anyone would build a house requiring a seven-mile, uphill climb through deadly cacti every day after work (which, I suppose, for the Verde Hohokam, meant hunting and gathering food). Just as I'm about to declare that the ruins' supposed coordinates must be wrong, I see that my GPS device reports that only 200 yards remain until we reach our target.

"Two football fields!" I yell back to Wendy. "If we don't see the ruins there, we're turning around."

But soon, as we claw our way up a smooth sandstone incline, I see the ruins of a dwelling, made of orange sandstone bricks, towering above us under a large cliff.

"I've found the ruins!" I yell, trying to sound as much as possible like Indiana Jones. I wish I were wearing a wide-brimmed fedora. As I continue scrambling toward the cliff dwelling from far below, I discover the imprint of a trail that would have made our approach much easier. When we reach the cliff-dwelling, Wendy and I take a quick look around and then rush back to retrieve Rich and Vik so that we can escort them back on the newly discovered trail.

When the four of us finally arrive at the ruins together, we look out at the grand expanse of Sycamore Canyon's floor, over 1,000 feet below us. The impressive view makes me wonder whether the Verde Hohokam built their home in such an inaccessible location for the same reason that movie stars build mansions on the top of cliffs in Malibu, California. I can't suppress my excitement and again start acting like a nerdy middle school teacher, reciting more facts from our archaeological guide.

"Archeologists believe that Indians positioned hilltop ruins sites atop high ridges, in sight of each other, intentionally, so that they could to communicate over long distances using smoke signals," I explain. I'm excited to discover that our book suggests that my great-view theory is partly accurate. "At one time, it was possible for Native Americans to make line-of-sight contact using these hilltop lookout posts from the Phoenix area to the Grand Canyon's South Rim."

I look out at the horizon, half expecting to see smoke signals or a magical wolfcow with a glistening white horse, revealing to us why Native Americans disappeared from here seven hundred years before. But all I see are the remarkable red and orange buttes and plateaus of central Arizona.

I realize that there's a part of me wishing that one of my middle school teachers were actually with us. They always seemed to have the answers.

Read the third part of this series about an Indian ruins road trip, in which Hank and his friends find themselves trapped in a huge snowstorm, dubbed Snowpocalypse 2010.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This essay, Becoming Indiana Jones, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

The Indian Unit, revisited

Hank Leukart — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

The Indian Unit, revisited.

Trying to one-up my middle school teachers by taking an Indian ruins road trip through America's Southwest.

PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST, Arizona — In seventh grade, my well-meaning middle-school teachers created a disaster of a lesson plan they called "The Indian Unit," which combined one part worthwhile history lessons, one part Native American theme park, and one part White Man's Guilt. During that stretch of Native American-themed school days, which seemed to me to last as long as the genuinely tragic Trail of Tears, I remember learning about Native American history in geography class, reading about the offensiveness of NFL team mascots in literature class, and calculating the volume of a teepee in math class. When we did something in school that a teacher liked, he gave us plastic wampum beads which we were to keep on a hokey necklace. As a special treat one day, the teachers gathered two hundred twelve year olds in the library and forced us to watch the full 240-minute version of Dances With Wolves, the gratuitous length of which almost killed all of us. The Indian Unit's grand finale was something the teachers called "Grand River Day": we went on a field trip to a local Ohio State park and tried to hunt rabbits by sending an impregnable line of kids to walk across a field and flush out the bunnies. Then we ate moose stew, a concoction that I'm pretty sure was made with beef from the local grocery store. I was a cynical tween, and I can't remember another two-month long stretch of my life during which I rolled my eyes more.

Last year, when my friend Wini, visiting from Switzerland, begged me to take her in my car on an Indian ruins road trip, all I could think about was ridiculous wampum necklaces and four hours of Kevin Costner's face. If my middle school teachers' goal was to leave me with positive feelings about Native American history, they had failed miserably. Fortunately, Wini also begged me to take her on tens of other trips — there are many great Western US travel possibilities — and so the proposed Indian road trip fell by the wayside.

Yet, strangely, the idea of it stuck in my head, long after Wini's return to Switzerland.

"It's time for an Indian ruins road trip!" I pronounce to my friends Rich, Wendy, and Vik. With enthusiasm, they agree to accompany me during a convenient weekend; fortunately, they never experienced The Indian Unit.

Soon, the four of us are driving toward Arizona in the night. I have appointed myself the car's annoying middle school teacher.

"About seven hundred years ago, around AD 1300, thousands of Native Americans, living among the beautiful red and orange mesas, buttes, and hoodoos of what is now the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, disappeared," I announce to my companions, synthesizing information as I gather it from Ancient Ruins of the Southwest: An Archaelogical Guide. Apparently, exposure to Native American history as an adult transforms me into a whimsical Indiana Jones/Mr. Wizard hybrid. "No one knows exactly why these tribes — the Hohokam, the Anasazi, and the Sinagua — decided to abandon the area, though archaeologists suspect that a drought, food shortages, overcrowding, disease, and foreign invasion may have been factors."

"You're like an educational human Podcast," Wendy groans as she rolls her eyes.

"When can we stop for a cigarette?" Vik asks.

"Wait, we're getting to Arizona at 3 AM and getting up at 6 AM? And we're doing this every day? To look for people who disappeared 700 years ago?" Rich asks me, bewildered.

I realize that I must have been really annoying to my middle school teachers.

"Well, not exactly," I say. "After all, the Hohokam, Anasazi, and Singuaga people from 1300 have been gone for centuries." But there is something about the idea of a "real" Indian Unit — one that replaces Kevin Costner and fake moose stew with the actual ruins of Native American civilizations — that has caught my imagination. I think that, maybe, we'll even discover a clue explaining the mysterious disappearance of these Indians. Maybe I can do better than my middle school teachers.

"Well, we can sleep in a little bit on the first morning," I explain, knowing that we're trying to fit a ten-day road trip into four days so that we can work around everyone's work schedules.

When we arrive in middle-of-nowhere Arizona near the supposed site of some remote ruins after driving from Los Angeles for eight hours, we're all deliriously tired. So we're not sure we trust our eyes, when, while driving down a dirt road into the pitch-black Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, our headlights reveal a strange animal in the darkness that we can't identify. We stop the car and stare at its eerie appearance, confused.

"It's a cow," Wendy says.

"No, cows don't look like that," Rich says. "It's a wolf."

"Maybe it's a wolfcow," I suggest.

I think of the Navajo legend about skinwalkers, people who have gained the supernatural ability, by performing a horrible act of evil (such as killing a family member), to turn into any animal they choose. According to the legend, skinwalkers often manifest themselves as wolves, and there's a ranch in Utah where many, along with UFOs and poltergeists, allegedly have been sighted. I don't mention the legend to anyone in the car, because, well, who wants to hear about an unbelievable myth from a grating faux middle school teacher?

We drive a few more feet, when suddenly, a glimmering white horse appears in front of the car. Seriously. No one says anything.

"I think it's time to set up camp and go to sleep," I say. But I'm thinking that we've only been on our Indian ruins road trip for eight hours and already I feel like we're kicking the butts of my old teachers. My middle school Indian Unit never made me feel like I had become entangled in a surreal Native American dream.

Read the second part of this series about an Indian ruins road trip, in which Hank and his friends become amateur archaeologists when they hike 14 miles, scale the rim of a steep canyon, and discover an ancient Native American cliff dwelling.

How to Take an Indian Ruins Road Trip

There are thousands of Native American ruins sites in the American Southwest. Amateur archeologists could spend weeks exploring them all. Here's a driving itinerary including some of the best. View this road trip on a map.

MONTEZUMA CASTLE NATIONAL MONUMENT: The Sinagua built this cliff dwelling, which, strangely, has (almost) nothing to do with the Aztec Montezuma. These ruins are impressive and easy to get to by walking a quarter-mile, paved loop. $5 per person.
PALATKI HERITAGE SITE AND HONANKI INDIAN RUINS: These two quarter-mile hikes near Sedona take hikers to the ruins of the largest cliff dwellings in Red Rock Country between 1150 and 1300 A.D.
CANYON DE CHELLY NATIONAL MONUMENT: Seeing this beautiful canyon will make you want to stay here forever. Unfortunately, due to a unique arrangement with the Navajo Nation, hiking or backpacking anywhere in the Monument requires a paid Navajo guide -- except for the White House Ruins Trail, a 3.5-mile round trip hike into the Canyon to some impressive Anasazi ruins. Jeep and horseback riding tours are also available. View my hike on the White House Trail.
FOUR CORNERS: This is the point at which Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. Tourists pay $3 to stand on the exact intersection. I have no idea why anyone would want do this. We did it. You'll do it too.
MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK: This fantastic park, called an Archeological Disneyland by some, boasts some of the most notable and best-preserved cliff dwellings in the US. In the summer, take guided tours to Cliff Palace and Balcony House; during the winter, take a guided tour to Spruce Tree House. No matter when you go, drive the six-mile Mesa Top Loop Road to see ruins from lookout points and try one of the park's hiking trails. $15 per vehicle in the summer; $10 per vehicle in the winter.
HOVENWEEP NATIONAL MONUMENT: This Monument allows visitors to see six prehistoric, Puebloan-era villages. $6 per vehicle.
MONUMENT VALLEY NAVAJO TRIBAL PARK: Drive this 17-mile dirt road loop to see the gorgeous buttes and plateaus of Monument Valley close up. A high clearance vehicle is recommended. Definitely worth the $5 per person, especially if you enjoy photography.
NAVAJO NATIONAL MONUMENT: See three Anecestral Puebloan cliff dwellings.
OFF THE BEATEN PATH: There are many Indian ruins sites outside National Parks and Monuments which can only be reached with help from Native American guides or enterprising hikers. Dave Wilson's Hiking Ruins Seldom Seen helps amateur archeologists willing to hike long distances find some of these sites.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This essay, The Indian Unit, revisited, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Photographs: Monument Valley

Hank Leukart — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

New Without Baggage photographs: Driving through the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This photograph collection, Monument Valley, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Photographs: Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde

Hank Leukart — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

New Without Baggage photographs: Anasazi Indian ruins.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This photograph collection, Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Photographs: Sycamore Canyon Ruins

Hank Leukart — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

New Without Baggage photographs: Hiking to Verde Hohokam Indian ruins in Arizona.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This photograph collection, Sycamore Canyon Ruins, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Photographs: Montezuma Castle

Hank Leukart — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

New Without Baggage photographs: A Sinagua cliff dwelling.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This photograph collection, Montezuma Castle, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Photographs: White House Ruins in Canyon de Chelly

Hank Leukart — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

New Without Baggage photographs: Hiking the White House Ruins Trail.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This photograph collection, White House Ruins in Canyon de Chelly, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Falling in love with a teenage vampire cardboard cutout

Hank Leukart — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

Falling in love with a teenage vampire cardboard cutout.

Trying to understand the Twilight phenomenon on a Forks, Washington tour.

This is the second essay in a two part series about my trip to Forks, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula. Read the first essay for the whole story.

FORKS, Washington — After eating breakfast adjacent to an enormous elk's head in the Forks Coffee Shop the next morning, Rich, Wendy, and I head outside — through a door reading "Add your name to the Twilight wall of fame!" — jump into our Twilight road trip minivan, and drive toward Olympic National Park. We're standing, in the pouring rain, at the trailhead for Cape Alava Trail, a 9-mile loop that takes hikers through dense, temperate rain forest to the Olympic Peninsula's shore. In rain jackets and pants, we walk under a canopy of 200-foot tall, moss-covered Douglas Fir trees, until we reach a break in the forest. A powerful, freezing sheet of rain pounds us in the face, and we look out at untouched, prehistoric-looking coastline, with rocky, white sand beaches littered with dark, massive old-growth driftwood and a restless ocean surface broken by rain-drenched sea stacks sprinkled with green grass.

In Twilight, the Olympic Peninsula's constant rain plays a major role, reinforcing Bella's consistently dour mood. As Bella yearns for Edward's attention, she describes Forks as "literally [her] personal hell on Earth" and complains that the rain "[makes] it dim as twilight under the [forest] canopy and [patters] like footsteps across the matted earthen floor." She describes the Pacific Ocean as "dark gray, even in the sunlight." She finds that the only way she can escape the dismal weather is through her lust, and eventually her love, for Edward. As the rain continues to pelt us and Wendy and Rich get ahead of me, I find myself empathizing with Bella. I can imagine how hiking in the rain could be a lot better with a devastatingly sexy female vampire. Well, minus the vampire part, I guess.

After our hike, we stop for dinner at Pacific Pizza, where I eat Bellasagna — which, you might be able to guess, is lasagna with a Twilight-themed name. Everything we see in Forks is Bellasagna: everyday objects rechristened in a half-assed attempt at a Twilight tie-in without any meaningful follow-through. I wonder if maybe these superficial attempts are a more accurate reflection of the book than I realize — I feel like I'm surrounded by perfunctory effort and teenage malaise.

After we eat, we decide to visit the Mill Creek Bar and Grill, where a Scottish singer-songwriter sings Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," Johnny Cash's "Riders in the Sky," and Warren Zevon's "Werewolves in London," all with changed, Twilight-themed lyrics. His new lyrics are underwhelming. But, by the end of the night, I'm embarrassed to admit that Rich, Wendy, and I are humming the chorus to "Werewolves in Forks."

On the way back to our bed and breakfast, Wendy explains the plot of Breaking Dawn in the car: "After Bella and Edward get married, Edward has sex with Bella so violently that she is knocked unconscious," Wendy says. It appears that she has become a diehard Twilight fan overnight. "Suddenly, Bella is pregnant, and her girl vampire-human baby becomes so strong that she breaks Bella's ribs and spine. Edward decides to rip open Bella's stomach with his teeth to save Bella and the baby. When the baby's finally out, Jacob, who was previously in love with Bella, falls in love with Bella's baby instead."

"Jacob falls in love with a baby?!" I ask in disbelief. "That is the most insane piece of abstinence-only education that I have ever heard."

The next morning, the three of us, a family with a 12-year-old daughter, and a Twilight-obsessed 22-year-old woman named Jenny with her husband in tow, meet for a guided Twilight tour outside Dazzled by Twilight, the town's largest Twilight souvenir shop. Travis, our guide, directs us to a Dazzled by Twilight tour bus (license plate: "DAZZLE1"). Gloomy songs from the Twilight movie soundtracks emanate from the bus's speakers while Travis tells us that Forks residents used to be mostly loggers. But these days, he says, the town's economy is kept afloat by the nearby Clallam Bay and Olympic Corrections Centers and tourists visiting to see Twilight sights and the Olympic National Park. Then, he takes a passenger poll to find out who is on Team Edward and who is on Team Jacob. (Twilight fans tend to divide themselves into two camps — pro-vampire or pro-werewolf — though some choose to remain on Team Switzerland.)

"Team Edward!" I yell, because, well, I'm trying to fit in. I don't really know what team I am on, or should be on, but I decide that I don't want be on the team with a dude who's in love with an infant. Twilight super fan Jenny looks at me, disgusted. Apparently she's on Team Jacob — and feels very strongly about it.

Then, Travis stops the bus outside a small, nondescript house.

"This is Bella's house," he says. Except, it isn't, because Bella is a fictional character and never actually lived in Forks. Even the Twilight movies weren't actually filmed in Forks. The only reason we're stopping at this house is because the Forks Chamber of Commerce designated it Bella's house.

It's Bellasagna.

I notice that ice skates are hanging next to the door, and I say that this seems strange, since Bella's character is famously clumsy and nonathletic. Jenny, who previously decided that she hated me for being on Team Edward, suddenly heartily agrees with me. Somehow, I've won her over.

Our tour continues in this manner, with Travis taking us to "The Cullen House," "Jacob's house," Forks City Hall ("Where Charlie, Bella's dad, works!"), the Forks Community Hospital ("Where Dr. Cullen works!"), and Forks High School. We even visit the Forks Timber Museum, where the Forks Chamber of Commerce has parked a replica of Bella's red 1953 Chevrolet pickup truck (license plate: "BELLA"). The delighted teenage girl and Jenny have their photos taken in front of every attraction. Rich, Wendy and I do too. I feel like I'm in a college semiotics seminar, in which a professor blows every student's mind by explaining that we live in a postmodern world filled with floating signifiers. Meanwhile, Travis keeps driving our tour bus to signifiers — but when we get out of the bus to look around, I realize that nothing means anything. Bellasagna is everywhere. The rain continues, drenching us, with no signs of sunshine. I feel like a confused teenager, disconnected and lost. I start to wonder if Travis's Twilight tour is working on me in a way I had never expected.

Travis drives us to the (real) Quillayute Indian Reservation, with Anya Marina's melancholy song Satellite Heart, from the The Twilight Saga: New Moon movie soundtrack, oozing through the tour bus. (Don't miss this totally emo video for it.)

I'm a satellite heart
Lost in the dark
I'm spun out so far
You stop, I start
But I'll be true to you.

As I listen, the song makes me think of the hundreds of women, camped out on a Los Angeles sidewalk in November, flirting with me. I think that maybe I'm starting to understand Twilight better. Adults mock young love lust because it seems so overwrought, so unsophisticated, and so naked. But Twilight seems to suggest that maybe adults are wrong — maybe love is the exclusive playground of the young and unjaded. Maybe Edward and Bella have to stay teenagers forever because that's the only way love can exist forever.

(Then again, maybe Stephanie Meyer is just trying to remind teenagers that if they have unprotected sex, they may end up creating super babies that break girls' spines. Her message is not totally lucid.)

When Travis drives us across the Treaty Line, where the Quillayute Reservation's land begins, we all get out of our tour bus and go into a small restaurant, which has cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate waiting for us. Inside, standing next to the restaurant's "Twilight Menu" (which includes the Bella Banana Split), we see cardboard cutouts of Edward Cullen and Jacob Black (represented by Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner). Jenny grabs the cutout of Edward, squeals, brings him over to her table, and demands to have her picture taken with him, I mean, it. I watch, in utter shock, because I'm positive she was a member of Team Jacob.

"I felt bad for Jacob, because no one went with his team," she explains apologetically. "But, really, I'm in love with Edward."

Then, in my weekend's strangest moment, I see her gaze deeply into the golden eyes of the cardboard cutout of a teenage vampire.

You know that glow of longing you only see behind a young woman's eyes when she really, really loves someone? That's what I saw. For a moment, they were two teenagers.

Maybe the glow was ironic.

Without Baggage thanks Dazzled by Twilight for generously donating Breaking Dawn tour tickets.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This essay, Falling in love with a teenage vampire cardboard cutout, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Twilight, ironically

Hank Leukart — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

Twilight, ironically.

Exploring Forks, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula, the setting of a teen vampire novel.

FORKS, Washington — I am walking down a Los Angeles sidewalk in November, wearing jeans, a polo shirt, and sunglasses, when I encounter hundreds of girls, mostly aged 12 to 22, camped out with tents and folding chairs. I walk by them for at least 10 blocks — a lot of walking for a car-obsessed city like Los Angeles — and as I pass, I notice them staring, whispering, and sometimes even shouting at me.

"Hey, want to join us?" a brown-eyed, dark-haired girl in jeans and boots yells suggestively at me.

"Are you in line too?" another one with a dark complexion asks me.

"You're hot," whispers a third, a carbon copy of the first two.

I'd be happy to brag and pretend that this experience is a typical snapshot of my everyday life in Los Angeles, but who would I be kidding? You'd never believe that anyway. I start to wonder what would make teenage girls fall instantly in love with me. It feels like they have mistaken me for a celebrity, but I've never been told that I look like any celebrity. (Okay, once, a girl told me that I look like Justin Timberlake, but I promise you that she was lying. I look nothing like him, and, needless to say, he would destroy me in a dance-off.) I begin to wonder if, by some miracle of fate, I have stumbled on a blessed clothing combination that makes me look drop-dead sexy. But then I catch a reflection of myself in a store window and realize that I just look like me.

"What are you guys waiting in line for?" I ask one of the girls. She looks up at me, playing with her hair and batting her eyelashes.

"It's the premiere of The Twilight Saga: New Moon," she says coyly.

Suddenly, everything makes sense to me. I have unwittingly walked into a mass of the most lust-consumed women in Los Angeles.

For those of you who are not in Twilight's target audience (mostly teenage girls and middle-aged women), here's an explanation: Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series — a collection of four books about introverted yet beautiful high school girl Bella Swan, who is trapped in a love triangle with mysterious and conflicted vampire Edward Cullen and shirtless underdog werewolf Jacob Black — has sold 85 million copies worldwide. Twilight is about teenage lust — and I don't simply mean that lust is one of the series' themes. I mean that Twilight is teenage lust. Read Twilight or watch the movie, and you'll see what I mean. The most accurate, and most complete, plot summary I can provide for the first book is simple: "O.M.G. That vampire is so hot."

I don't mean to totally deride Twilight. Though I have read only the first book and watched the first two movies (to write this essay), I can attest that, her simplistic writing aside, Meyer captures the essence of teenage desire and isolation perfectly, in a way that resonates intensely with its almost-exclusively female audience.

So, when about two months after being mentally undressed by hundreds of girls on an LA sidewalk, my travel buddies Rich and Wendy suggest that we meet in Seattle after a business trip, the first thing that pops into my head is Twilight. Well, not exactly — I first imagine driving to Forks, Washington to go hiking in the beautiful Olympic Peninsula, near Seattle. But then, I think, Oh, that's the setting of Twilight — and then I'm incredibly embarrassed that my brain has bothered even to store that information. Still, I'm curious. Maybe Twilight's enormous success could make more sense to me if I give Forks a chance.

"Why don't we go hiking on the Olympic Peninsula," I say to Rich and Wendy — and then almost under my breath: "We can also go on a Twilight tour."

They look at me incredulously.

"You know, ironically," I quickly add.

They spend a few minutes mocking me, but they aren't too surprised — I've dragged them on other off-beat adventures — we've bungee jumped from a bridge in the wilderness and investigated Area 51 before. By now, they're used to — and, I like to think, even appreciative — of my harebrained trip ideas. That's the thing with adventure — it's addictive, but it's also fulfilling, in a way that alcohol, drugs, and Facebook status updates are not.

Soon, the three of us are driving around the southern tip of Washington's Puget Sound, from Seattle to Forks, in an oversized, white van (the rental car company gave us a great deal on it). At first glance, outsiders might assume that we're a family on a road trip with a minivan filled with Twilight-obsessed tweens — except there are no tweens — just three adults who can barely remember which character is Edward (the vampire) and which one is Jacob (the werewolf).

Always eager to get a glimpse into pop culture niches, I turn on Twilight Series Theories, a podcast hosted by Twilight super fans and sisters Kallie Matthews and Kassie Rodgers that I have loaded onto my iPod in preparation for our road trip. I select an episode — in which Kallie, Kassie, and their listeners compare and contrast Twilight with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice — because the description makes it sound like it might have intellectual overtones. In reality, Kallie and Kassie's critical analysis is at a level that could seem intellectual only to a sixth grader, including commentary like: "For me, the fact that Twilight and Pride and Prejudice are in two different time periods, I guess, is what makes the difference, because people expect the heroine to be this strong, outspoken person, where Bella, she, you know, the book is from her perspective and she does end up being considered the heroine in the books. I don't know. It's just weird." Rich, Wendy, and I can't wait for it to end.

Not easily deterred, I then try playing an episode of Imprint, another Twilight podcast hosted by four college students, Andrew Sims, Elysa Montfort, Matt Britton, and Laura Thompson. We expect that we're in for another hour of torture, but after only 15 minutes, we're totally hooked. The quartet discusses Twilight in a breezy yet intelligent way that manages to increase our interest in the books while also making us laugh, a lot. Their trick, of course, is that they don't take themselves too seriously.

"Someone should cancel The View and give these guys a talk show instead," I say.

"I wish they had taught my college English classes," Wendy says.

Near the end of the first Imprint episode, during a discussion about the difficulty of book-to-movie adaptations, Elysa mentions, but doesn't fully explain, a gruesome scene in Breaking Dawn.

"Wait, Edward bites a half-vampire baby out of Bella's stomach?!" Wendy exclaims, horrified. "What is she talking about?"

"Uh, we're not the people to ask," Rich says, looking at me.

"We need to find out what this is about," Wendy says urgently.

After four and a half hours of driving and Twilight podcasts, we arrive at The Miller Tree Inn (also known as The Cullen House after being so-designated by the Forks Chamber of Commerce), a bed and breakfast filled to the brim with Twilight-related props, complete with a whiteboard on the front porch showing updates on The Cullen's whereabouts. (When we arrive, it says, "The Cullens are taking a hike in the woods.") We walk past pictures of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson (the actors in the Twilight movies), copies of the Twilight movie soundtrack, and even a display of 125 graduation caps: the eternally-teenage Cullens' high school souvenirs described in Twilight. When we arrive at our room, we're allowed to choose from a collection of Twilight-themed signs for our door (we choose "Edward's Room.") When Wendy sees a complete collection of the Twilight novels on the room's desk, she grabs Breaking Dawn immediately.

"I need to find out about this baby-biting thing," Wendy explains. She changes into her pajamas, plops down on the bed, and starts reading.

Rich and I look at each other. Maybe it's a girl thing, he says to me, telepathically. Thank God we're only here ironically, I respond, silently.

Click here to read the second part of this two-essay series about Forks, in which Hank gets trapped in a tour bus with a group of Twilight super fans, then watches a woman fall in love with a cardboard cutout.

A Travel Guide to Forks, Washington

DIRECTIONS: Forks, Washington is about a four and a half hour drive from Seattle, Washington. You can get to Forks by driving on I-5 North to Edmonds, taking the car ferry from Edmonds to Kingston, and then taking WA-104 to US-101 to Forks. If you prefer, you can avoid taking a ferry by driving south around the Puget Sound by taking I-5 South to WA-16 to WA-3 to WA-104 to US-101 to Forks, though depending on traffic and the ferry schedule, this can take longer.
LODGING: In Forks, the Miller Tree Inn (a.k.a. The Cullen House, $105-$205) is the best place to stay for Twilight fans. The owners are remarkably friendly, the charming, comfortable house is filled with Twilight memorabilia, and the gingerbread pancakes with lemon sauce served for breakfast are worth the price of the room alone. If your budget is tight, you can also try the Forks Motel ($58-$150). This no-frills motel has spacious, comfortable rooms more than worth their price.
TWILIGHT SIGHTSEEING: Tourists can easily visit all of these sights on their own (see the Without Baggage Twilight-sights map). However, for $39 per person, Dazzled by Twilight will take fans on a Forks tour, complete with hot chocolate and a cinnamon roll. The sightseeing is irrelevant; the real fun is being trapped in a tour bus with a gaggle of Twilight fans singing along to the movies' soundtracks. For diehard fans (though probably not for reluctant tagalongs), the experience is worth the price.

"Forks Welcomes You" Sign (seen on US-101 on the way into town): You'll be sure to run into some tweens and their moms when you go to take photos here.
The Cullen House (a.k.a. The Miller Tree Inn) (654 E Division St.): You can see Twilight memorabilia through the windows if you're not staying here, but the fun is in the charming rooms and their yummy breakfast.
Forks City Hall and Police Department (500 E Division St.): Tourists can take pictures in front of the "Forks City Hall" sign outside and the "Police Department" door in the lobby; there is also a small Twilight souvenirs display inside.
Forks High School (411 S. Spartan Ave.): Twilight fans can take photos with the sign in front of the school, but be warned: the school doesn't look like anything seen in the movies.
Forks Outfitters (950 S. Forks Ave.): Lots of Twilight merchandise is available here, the place where Bella works part-time in the novels. You can also pick up Forks and Forks High School T-shirts and hoodies.
Bella's Truck (Forks Chamber of Commerce, 1411 South Forks Ave.): The Forks Chamber of Commerce purchased a 1953 Chevrolet pickup truck, painted it red, added a "BELLA" license plate, and left it for photographs outside the Forks Visitor Center.
Bella's House (775 K St.): The Forks Chamber of Commerce designated this two-story house Bella's and Charlie's. It's just a house.
Forks Community Hospital (530 Bogachiel Way): In the novels, Dr. Carlisle Cullen works here and Bella is taken here after Tyler almost drives into her with his car. You'll see a "Dr. Cullen: Reserve Parking Only" sign here.
Dazzled by Twilight store (11 N. Forks Ave.): Here's where you can pick up a Twilight T-shirt (or a bumper sticker, or cardboard cutout of Robert Pattinson).
Treaty Line (7760 La Push Rd.): Here, a "No Vampires Beyond This Point" sign designates the start of the Quillayute Indian Reservation.
First Beach in La Push (drive west on La Push Rd. until you can't drive anymore): This is the setting of Bella's trip to the beach with her high school friends, and it's where she learns the history of the feud between vampires and werewolves from Jacob. More importantly, this stretch of coastline is one of the most beautiful sights in Washington State.
Bella Italia (118 E. 1st. St., Port Angeles): Edward takes Bella to this (real) restaurant in Port Angeles, Washington in the first novel. Fans can even order the same mushroom ravioli that Bella orders in the book ($17, dinner only).

HIKING: If you go to Forks only to see Twilight-related sights, you're missing the real point of Forks: it's a gateway to wilderness. Hiking in nearby Olympic National Park should not be missed. If you have a few days, try backpacking the 3-day, 20-mile trail down Washington's stunning coastline from Lake Ozette to Rialto Beach. As an added bonus, First Beach (just south of Rialto) is the setting of Bella's high school beach trip. If an overnight hike is too ambitious for you, try the 9-mile Cape Alava Trail, which still gives hikers a taste of Washington's temperate rain forest and coastline. View my route and download the Without Baggage Cape Alava Trail GPS track in GPX or KML format.
SKIING, SNOWBOARDING, AND SNOWSHOEING: If you're visiting Forks in the winter, you shouldn't miss a chance to ski, snowboard, or snowshoe at Hurricane Ridge, a beautiful mountainous area inside Olympic National Park.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This essay, Twilight, ironically, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Photographs: Forks, Washington

Hank Leukart — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

New Without Baggage photographs: Visiting the setting of Twilight and hiking the Cape Alava Trail in the Olympic Peninsula.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This photograph collection, Forks, Washington, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

How I came to believe in Santa Claus

Hank Leukart — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

How I came to believe in Santa Claus.

Brothers face the hardest single trekking day of their lives, snowshoeing up the Grand Canyon's North Rim.

This is the final essay in a series about Santa Claus's Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim winter hike. Start with the first essay to read the whole story.

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Arizona — Brian and I start to doubt the magic of our Santa suit as frozen rain and snow pelts us relentlessly on the way to Cottonwood Camp at the bottom of the Grand Canyon's North Rim. In the morning, we passed the location of the burst water pipe the Park Ranger had warned us about — which turned out to have caused little more than a deep puddle on the trail. But in the afternoon, as unforgiving winter weather worsened, we were forced to pack away the sopping wet, frozen Santa costume to avoid getting hypothermia. Now, in the shadow of the 8,060-foot high North Rim, we know that the easy part of our trek is over.

After a sub-freezing night at Cottonwood, we wake early in the morning to find the zippers on our tent frozen shut and our rain fly covered in ice. After packing up our gear, we start hiking through snow on the North Kaibab Trail. At first, it's not deep enough to require our snowshoes. We make our way up the snowy, narrow path, teetering precariously on the edge of Canyon ridges, looking down on swaths of blood-red boulders covered in blinding white snow and desert cacti. We're thankful for a clear, sapphire sky and warm sunlight, a notable contrast from the sleet and snow of the previous day.

As we hike under a seemingly never ending lattice of oversized icicles, the snow on the trail gradually deepens, starting from two feet and eventually reaching five. We put on our snowshoes. Hiking to the top of the Grand Canyon's North Rim with a heavy backpack is a draining feat in ideal conditions, but with huge snowdrifts, we discover that it's a nearly impossible physical challenge. The embarrassing truth is that we've had fantasies of our snowshoes enabling us to glide effortlessly on the tops of the snow drifts, but they aren't coming true — at all. The trail has been deserted for a month, and we find ourselves trailblazing through unpacked, very deep snow. In fact, our snowshoes seem useless — that is, until, we try taking them off and find ourselves immobilized, waist-deep in white powder. We put the snowshoes back on, preventing our feet from sinking more than a couple feet. Of course, the foot-sinking turns out to be only half the battle — immediately after each step, we must then pull our foot and snowshoe out of the sink hole — over, and over, and over, for miles, and miles, and miles.

We come to another revelation: snowshoeing on an unused trail would be great fun with a group of eight people, but with only two, it's a nightmare. The person in front doing the trailblazing, packing down the deep snow drifts, ends up working much, much harder than the person following in his footsteps. When I'm the trailblazer, I endure about twenty steps. Then, utterly exhausted, I turn around and announce that there is no chance we'll ever make it to the top and insist that our mission is doomed to failure. Brian, following behind, insists, "No, we can definitely make it to the top! We just need to keep moving!" Then, he takes over as trailblazer. Twenty steps later, he announces that we'll never make it to the top and begs me to give up the mission. We repeat this process, dozens of times, for three miles.

When we reach the rock hole called Supai Tunnel, I am encouraged, because I remember from a previous North Kaibab Trail hike in autumn that even sixty-year-old grandmothers, in ideal conditions, were able to hike from Supai Tunnel to the top. As we pass through the Tunnel, I'm sure that Brian and I can be as strong as grandmothers. But on the other side of the Tunnel, we encounter ten-foot snowdrifts for the first time. Mule-typing posts, used most of the year as a resting area for tourist-carrying mules, barely peek out from the top of the snow drifts. The sun is setting. The temperature is plummeting. We're clawing our way up the trail through the snow at less than half a mile per hour, on New Year's Eve, 2009. We don't see any grandmothers around. Father Christmas is nowhere to be found.

We both feel like we'd rather jump to our death from one of the Canyon's ridges than do any more trailblazing. I, behind Brian, decide that our struggle is purely psychological, and I try to take over trailblazing. But, immediately, I feel like I don't have enough energy to take one additional step in the deep snow, let alone the thousands more we need to take to get to the top. A beautiful purple and orange sunset, seen over the snow-covered walls of the Canyon's rugged crags, soon gives way to almost total darkness. The temperature reaches zero degrees Fahrenheit. I feel something foreign stuck in my hiking boots, and then I realize that it's simply my toes, which feel like they're no longer part of my body, because they've gone completely numb. I turn around and look into Brian's eyes in what feels like the least manly moment of our lives.

"We can't make it," Brian says. "It's too dark. It's too cold. We need to stop."

I know he's right, but we're only a mile and a half below the rim, and the idea of giving up is so dispiriting I can't bring myself to say anything. In almost total silence, we pack down an area of snow with our snowshoes and erect our tent only feet from the edge of a 2,000-foot drop into the Canyon's abyss.

In our tent, we put on every piece of clothing that we have, stuff chemical heat packs into our socks, and zip ourselves, like mummies, into our sleeping bags. We're almost out of water, so we boil pots of snow to make dinner and rehydrate ourselves. Without discussing our plan much, I set my alarm to wake us up an hour before sunrise the next morning.

During the night, I wake to discover that the sleeping bag fabric on my skin is ice cold, and our water bottles are frozen solid. It's the coldest night we have ever spent camping. I step outside the tent and find myself blinded by the intensely bright light of a full moon bouncing off the snow in the Canyon. I begin shivering immediately and uncontrollably. When I get back in the tent, Brian tells me he needs to go to the bathroom. I'm about to warn him about the conditions outside when he disappears. He's gone for about sixty seconds and then stumbles back into the tent, shivering and looking he has just escaped a ten-day stint trapped in a meat freezer.

"DO. NOT. GO. OUT. THERE." he says. "Seriously. I'm totally blind. I can't feel my skin. Promise me that we will never, ever go snowshoeing again."

"I know," I say. "I know."

I start drifting back to sleep. I'm halfway between being awake and unconsciousness when I think I see our red Santa Suit, crumpled in a ball in the tent's vestibule, covered in frost and shimmering in the moonlight, doused in pink, prickly pear syrup. Visions of me and Brian, celebrating on the Grand Canyon's North Rim on New Year's Day morning wearing the Santa Suit, dance through my head.

I realize that, the next morning, our magical Santa suit will get us to the top.

When our wakeup alarm sounds, we reluctantly get out of our sleeping bags, only to discover that our previously wet hiking boots have become frozen blocks of ice. They are so frozen solid that we can't even get our feet halfway into them. We fire up the stove, and I pour a pot of boiling water onto my boots. After they thaw a bit, I manage to shove my feet into them. Quickly, they refreeze, and my feet feel like they're trapped in blocks of ice, locked in a freezer, inside a tub of ice cream, on the North Pole.

We forego breakfast, pack small daypacks, and decide that we're going to take one last shot to get to the North Rim, this time without our 45-pound backpacks weighing us down. Seconds before we leave our camp, the Santa suit catches my eye, and I shove it into my daypack.

Though our final ascent to the North Rim feels even more arduous than the day before, I push forward, remembering my New Year's Eve dreams. When we reach an area under a canopy over Engelmann Spruce trees, I tell Brian that the area seems familiar to me. Then we see it: the "Coconino Overlook" sign, almost completely buried in snow. It's a sign that I have seen, on a previous hike in the Canyon without snow, and I know that we're less than three-quarters of a mile from the top.

"We can make it now," I announce, feeling barely sure.

Ignoring the pain in our legs, we continue toward the top, with 100-foot spruce trees towering over us and huge swaths of snow in every direction. I'm leading us up an incline, when I spot the North Kaibab Trailhead sign, 50 feet ahead of us. It looks about a quarter tall as the last time I saw it, because the snow is so deep.

"We made it! Happy New Year! We did it! Happy New Year!" we yell, over and over. We're exhausted and relieved, giddy and ecstatic. We take turns putting on the Santa suit, posing for New Year's Day photos on the Grand Canyon's North Rim.

Then, together, we take one last look at the gorgeous, snowy Canyon view before heading back down, toward the South Rim again.

"It's just too Grand," Brian says quietly.

"Too Grand," I agree.

I don't think I'm too old to say it. I believe in Santa Claus.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This essay, How I came to believe in Santa Claus, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Hiking in Santa Claus's bright celebrity spotlight

Hank Leukart — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

Hiking in Santa Claus's bright celebrity spotlight.

Trekking the Grand Canyon as Saint Nicholas turns out to be a full time job.

This is the second essay in a series about Santa Claus's Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim winter hike. Start with the first essay to read the whole story.

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Arizona — Brian and I are walking briskly across a parking lot, our stomachs filled with pink syrup, when we realize that we have no idea where the trailhead for the Bright Angel Trail into the Grand Canyon is located. I unfold our topographical map in an attempt to find the huge, one-mile deep hole in the ground that we know is less than 500 feet from us. Suddenly, the group of surfer-looking guys that we met at the Backcountry Information Center seem slightly less ridiculous.

Standing dumbfounded on the asphalt, gazing, bewildered, at a huge backcountry map, Brian and I look like the world's most inexperienced hikers. We laugh at ourselves — not because the scene is ridiculous, though it is — but because we've gotten lost, just like this, within the first ten seconds of every major hike we've ever embarked upon. By now, it's tradition. If we ever know where we're going at the beginning of a trek, then I'll worry.

But soon, we're standing on a precipice looking into a gigantic crevice, over one mile deep, 277 miles long and 18 miles wide, amazed by the expanse of snow-covered, 2-billion-year-old rock striations. The dazzling range of rock colors: brick reds, copper oranges, sunflower yellows, sky blues, and deep purples prompts us to take a moment before starting down the trail.

"It truly is 'aweful,'" I say.

Brian tries to take a picture of the landscape, but our wide-angle lens totally fails to capture the spectacular vista.

"It's just too Grand," my brother jokes.

"Too Grand," I agree.

Soon, we're hiking down Bright Angel Trail, a path filled with families and couples taking short day hikes on the Park's least steep route into the Canyon. With so many people near the Canyon's South Rim, I decide that this is the perfect time to don the Santa suit that I shoved into my backpack in the parking lot. I stop on a snowy ridge and quickly put on the costume over my jacket and synthetic pants. When I add my backpack over the suit, I've become Santa Claus: Outdoor Adventure Edition.

Bizarrely, as we make our way down the snow-covered trail toward the Canyon floor, I seem to fit in perfectly with the wintery backdrop while also looking totally out of place. I'm surprised to discover that wearing a bright red and white felt suit turns me into a totally different person. I start yelling "Ho, Ho, Ho!" and "Merry Christmas!" to every hiker we pass on the snowy trail. As the trip continues, Brian and I begin alternating the Santa suit between us. We discover, to our delight, that the costume casts a magic spell over the other hikers too. Families, couples, and even hardcore outdoor adventurers not only become instantly happy and uncharacteristically friendly when we run into them, but they almost always treat us as though they believe that the one of us with the suit is the real Father Christmas.

"Thanks for the presents, Santa!" many hikers say.

"I've been hiking here since 1976," one woman tells Santa, "and this is the first time I've ever seen Santa Claus coming down the trail."

"Can I take a photo of you and my wife?" a surprising number of men ask Santa.

Children simply stare at Santa in awe. One teenage girl takes one look at Santa hiking down the trail and says, simply: "Awesome." Tourists riding mules laugh when Santa shouts, "Have a Happy New Year!" as they pass. A 10-year-old boy, first unimpressed by Santa's appearance, becomes enraptured when Santa reveals his ambitious plan to hike to the North Rim and back.

As we continue down the trail, we start to realize that constantly staying in character is exhausting. "I feel like I need to be 'on' all the time," I complain to Brian. Soon, we begin cataloging a repertoire of witty responses, so that we're always prepared for other hikers' clever remarks. We feel like we're in a Santa role-playing arms race.

"Aren't you hot in that suit, Santa?" one hiker asks. "Of course not! My suit is magic, and I have 365 of them in my closet — one for every day of the year!" I respond.

"Santa, what are you doing here in the Grand Canyon?" another queries. "My sleigh broke down, and I'm hiking back to the North Pole," Brian responds. "By the way, have you seen Blitzen? Or any of the other reindeer?"

"Santa, it's a little late for Christmas," a few criticize. "Trust me, I didn't miss Christmas," I respond. "I was working the whole night. Afterward, I always vacation in the US National Parks. They're second to none."

"Santa, I didn't get what I wanted for Christmas this year!" many complain. "Well, I have my list, and I checked it twice," Brian retorts. "I'm sorry, Santa. I'll try better next year," they apologize.

After a day of Santa banter, all the while taking photos with hikers, Brian and I arrive at the Indian Garden campsite, fatigued from the spotlight of Santa's celebrity. When we erect our tent and settle in at our campsite, I take off the Santa suit so that we can relax and enjoy dinner.

But soon after, a friendly, 40-year-old blonde woman from Wisconsin rushes over to us. "What happened to your suit, Santa? It really raised my spirits! I loved it!" she gushes. "May I play you guys a song on my harmonica?"

As we cook dinner, she serenades us with "Red River Valley" — an old, lonely cowboy folk tune — while snow falls on us under the shadow of the Grand Canyon's towering South Rim.

Come sit by my side if you love me
Do not hasten to bid me adieu
But remember the Red River Valley
And the cowboy who loved you so true.

As we compliment her impressive musical talents, I realize that this is the first time ever that we have been offered a harmonica performance while backpacking. I realize that the red felt coat in my backpack is, indeed, somehow magical. It has a surprisingly powerful ability to bring people together and put smiles on their faces.

With hopes that we'll someday meet again, the woman with the harmonica asks for our e-mail addresses, which we write for her on a stray piece of a National Park brochure that she's carrying with her. We write our contact information just above the Park Service's slogan, which is printed on the paper. "Hank and Brian Leukart: Experience Your America," it reads. She laughs.

Early the next morning, Brian puts on the Santa suit and goes to fill his Camelbak with water. A twenty-something-year-old woman interrupts him.

"Santa! Do you mind if I sit on your lap and get a picture?" she asks.

"Of course not," my brother says. "It's my job."

We used to think that Santa worked only one night per year. Now, we know there's no escaping Santa's celebrity. It's a full time job. But it's an easy job to love.

Read the finale to this series about a Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim hike in winter, in which ten-foot snowdrifts and dangerously cold temperatures call into question Hank and Brian's ability to reach the North Rim safely.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This essay, Hiking in Santa Claus's bright celebrity spotlight, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.

Santa Claus snowshoes the Grand Canyon, rim to rim to rim

Hank Leukart — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

Santa Claus snowshoes the Grand Canyon, rim to rim to rim.

Brothers tackle a classic trek with magical, holiday cheer.

GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Arizona — Before I tell the story of how Santa Claus ended up hiking in the Grand Canyon this December, I suppose I must tell the Story of My Santa Suit. The story begins with me buying the world's cheapest Santa Claus costume — one made of thin felt, with no beard and fake leather pieces that supposedly make normal shoes look like Santa's boots — in an attempt to entertain guests at my Christmas party in early December. Strangely, when my sister Jen saw the resulting photos of (sometimes reluctant) partygoers sitting on my lap (thanks, Facebook), she demanded that I stage an encore performance of my unconvincing Santa at her Christmas Eve party for her neighborhood's kids. Always willing to embarrass myself, I covertly climbed up onto the high porch of her backyard tree house in Orange County on Christmas Eve, hid behind a forest of palm fronds, and loudly jangled a garland of sleigh bells. Immediately, my six- and seven-year-old nephews, as well as ten other children, came running outside the house to see Santa. The children yelped with delight when they caught a glimpse of me, dressed as Saint Nicholas, hiding behind the trees high above them. I was amazed that my seemingly magical suit enchanted the kids so easily. Nevertheless, my strained rendition of "Ho! Ho! Ho!" prompted my brother-in-law to exclaim, "Uh, oh. Santa's angry." I tried.

Just a few days after my not-even-close-to-Golden-Globe-winning Santa performance, my brother Brian and I threw our backpacking equipment, as well as the Santa suit, into my car, and we began driving across the Arizona desert toward the Grand Canyon. We have a history of seeking out the world's best hiking expeditions, then figuring out how we can amp up their difficulty and danger levels, to turn them into true adventures. On Vancouver Island's West Coast Trail, we jumped across hazardous surge channels and raced against high tides on our way to Michigan Beach. In Torres del Paine National Park in Chilean Patagonia, we tackled two side trips, 21 additional miles in pouring rain and snow, in addition to the typical park loop. When we traveled to Alaska's Denali National Park to hike to McGonagall Pass, we escaped from a freezing glacial river and then added a 15-mile detour across an almost impassable glacier. So, when we decided to take on the Grand Canyon's iconic rim to rim to rim hike — which demands that hikers trek from the South Rim of the Canyon, down to the canyon floor, up to the top of the North Rim, and then back again — we wondered what we might be able to do to make our fantastic hiking plans even more fantastic. (After all, we have friends who believe that our secret motto is, "Whoever dies on the craziest, most dangerous adventure, wins," and we never want to disappoint them.)

We had already encountered difficulty trying to embark on this particular hike. Backcountry hiking in the Grand Canyon is famously popular, and hikers who want reservations must apply by FAX four months in advance. I sent FAXs three separate times, and each time, the National Park rejected our application because other hikers managed to beat us to it. It's also possible to simply show up at the Grand Canyon in an attempt to nab a small number of last-minute permits, but during the ideal hiking season, last-minute hikers often have to wait for days before starting their hike. But then, an idea dawned on me: if we attempted the hike outside the ideal season, in late December, we would have almost no competition for permits, because deep snowdrifts and sub-freezing temperatures on the North Rim's North Kaibab Trail make the hike all but impossible that time of year.

In early December, I decide to call the Grand Canyon's Backcountry Information office to run my idea past the Park Ranger.

"Well, you won't be able to get up to the North Rim," she says. "It's closed, and you'll risk hypothermia if you try to hike through the deep snow up there."

"What if we carry snow shoes?" I ask.

"That might help," she says. "But it would still be extraordinarily difficult. No one has been up there in a month. "

That's all I need to hear. Soon, I've convinced Brian to buy two shiny new pairs of Atlas 925 snowshoes with me, and we've resolved to hike to the North Rim and back.

At 3:00 AM on the morning after leaving Orange Country, we arrive at the world's most famous hole in the ground. After only four hours of sleep, we show up at the Grand Canyon's South Rim Backcountry Information Center at 7:58 AM, where we're greeted by a gaggle of other eager hikers holding priority numbers, assigned to them the day before. We don't yet have a number, so things don't look good for us. While we're waiting, three twenty-something guys in sunglasses and hoodies, who look like they've just came from a surfing competition, get out of a big RV and join us in line.

"What are we waiting for?" one of them says. "Is this the line to the Grand Canyon?"

My brother and I helpfully point them toward the huge, adjacent void in the desert.

Finally, after all of the number-holders receive permits, the Park Ranger tells us that a few remain. We tell her that we want to hike to the North Rim.

"You'll never make it. The snow's too deep," she says. "Also, this morning, a water main burst on the trail to Cottonwood Camp. We closed the route because we think the trail may break off the side of the Canyon, and there won't be any drinking water past that point." Apparently, being a Park Ranger means being a professional discourager.

We explain our ambitious snowshoeing plan to her, adding in details of our extensive trekking experience, and she backs down. Reluctantly, she enters the details of our planned 5-day, rim-to-rim-to-rim snowshoeing itinerary into the park's archaic computer system.

(Note: There are hikers who manage to hike from rim to rim (and sometimes back) in one or two days. If you're a glutton for punishment and a talented athlete, such a trip is possible, though only by traveling in ideal temperature and snow conditions and not carrying a backpack with heavy camping equipment. But to properly savor and enjoy this adventure, hikers should set aside at least four, and preferably six, days for this trip. Considered to be one of the most dangerous hikes in America, this trek has left many people injured or dead in the Canyon due to poor trip planning and unforgiving weather conditions.)

By the time we leave, she begins encouraging us — I assume because, at this point, there's no reason for her to be honest about what she thinks will happen. She doesn't want any of her gloomy predictions to end up becoming true.

"No one has been up there since November," she calls out as we leave. "But if you make it, let us know what it's like up there!"

In the parking lot of the Backcountry Information Center, we pull our 45-pound backpacks out of my car's trunk, and I notice my Santa suit, still sitting in the trunk from my sister's Christmas Eve party. In a sudden moment of inspired whimsy, I stuff the bright red jacket and pants into my backpack. Admittedly, this action is an enormous protocol violation, because Brian and I normally weigh and mutually approve every item that goes into our backpacks to minimize weight.

"Really?!" Brian asks with a strong dose of sarcasm.

In the El Tovar Hotel's white-table clothed dining room overlooking the Canyon's South Rim, Brian and I order El Tovar's Pancake Trio: a plate of buttermilk, blue cornmeal, and buckwheat pancakes. While we wait for the food, my brother writes a postcard to his girlfriend in an affected voice intended to give the impression that we're colonial explorers, discovering the Grand Canyon for the time:

"It hath been over a fortnight since last I wrote," Brian scrawls. "The road west tests a man to his very limit. Hank has been struck with typhoid. A kind Navajo healer has done all he can, but he told us that the only chance we have is to continue to a mysterious, awe-inspiring place called the Great Gash of Awe. We're calling it the Aweful Canyon. We're still working on the name."

Soon, our waiter arrives with our matching breakfasts and a saucière of bright pink prickly pear syrup.

"This is prickly pear syrup, which is the syrup that the chef paired with these pancakes," he says nervously. Then he pauses for about 10 seconds, looking at us, as though he's challenging us to beg for normal syrup. We get the impression that he's had previous problems selling his diners on the neon goo — or maybe he doesn't think we look sophisticated enough to handle a radioactive-looking pancake topping.

What he doesn't know is that my brother and I will try anything. He doesn't know that we're carrying snowshoes, a Santa suit, and an endless yearning to do the impossible. He doesn't know that his prickly pear syrup is the least risky thing we'll try during the next five days, during our mission to hike the Grand Canyon in winter, rim to rim to rim.

We slather our pancakes with the syrup, and quickly, we've cleaned our plates.

Read the second part of this series, in which Hank and Brian discover the surprisingly demanding spotlight of Santa Claus's celebrity.

How to Hike the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim to Rim

Visit the Grand Canyon National Park Backcountry Permit information site to learn how to apply for a permit. You should FAX the Backcountry Permit Request Form four months in advance of your planned hiking dates to give you the highest chance of receiving a permit.
The best months to hike the Grand Canyon are March through May and September through November, because temperatures on the Canyon floor can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer. Unfortunately, those months are also the most difficult months to obtain permits. All North Rim services are closed mid-October to mid-May, and hiking to the North Rim without snowshoes (and even with them) is extremely difficult during the winter months.
You can also simply show up at the Backcountry Information Office to attempt to get a last-minute permit, but due to the waitlist process, it's likely that you'll have to wait at least two to three days before starting your hike during the typical Grand Canyon hiking season (March through November).
The Grand Canyon South Rim, usually the starting point for rim to rim to rim hikes, is located in northern Arizona. It's a two hour drive from Flagstaff, a four hour drive from Phoenix, and a six hour drive from Las Vegas.
SIX-DAY ITINERARY: This itinerary lets you savor the Canyon and prevents you from having to complete more than one rim ascent or descent in a single day. Descending South Kaibab Trail makes more sense for most people because, as compared to Bright Angel Trail, it's significantly steeper and its expansive views are more scenic. Then, hikers can return by way of the less grueling Bright Angel Trail.

South Kaibab Trailhead to Bright Angel Camp
Bright Angel Camp to Cottonwood Camp
Cottonwood Camp to the North Rim Campground
The North Rim Campground to Cottonwood Camp
Cottonwood Camp to Bright Angel Camp
Bright Angel Camp to the Bright Angel Trailhead

FOUR-DAY ITINERARY: This short itinerary is for experienced hikers but still prevents you from having to complete more than one rim ascent or descent in a single day.

South Kaibab Trailhead to Cottonwood Camp
Cottonwood Camp to the North Rim Campground
The North Rim Campground to Bright Angel Camp
Bright Angel Camp to the Bright Angel Trailhead

TWO- OR ONE-DAY ITINERARY: It is possible to do this hike in two days (or even one day) in ideal weather conditions (April and October) without a backpack. The advantage of doing this is that you won't need a backcountry permit, but you won't get to savor your journey much and you'll probably be starting and ending your days by hiking for hours in the dark. You'll also need a hotel reservation on the North Rim since you won't be carrying a tent. Only the fittest hikers should try this stunt:

South Kaibab Trailhead to North Rim Campground
North Rim Campground to Bright Angel Trailhead

ONE-WAY ITINERARY: If a rim-to-rim-to-rim hike seems like more than you're ready to sign up for, you can always try a shorter rim-to-rim hike. For $80 per person, Transcanyon Shuttle will take hikers on the 4.5 hour drive from one rim to the other. You can also try exchanging car keys with someone you see in the Canyon and arranging a meeting point or dividing your hiking group into two groups, starting at opposite rims.
View our route and download the Without Baggage Grand Canyon Rim to Rim to Rim GPS track in GPX or KML format. Note that GPS devices only work intermittently on the Canyon floor.

Copyright © 2000 - 2010 by Hank Leukart, All Rights Reserved. This essay, Santa Claus snowshoes the Grand Canyon, rim to rim to rim, originally appeared on Without Baggage. You do not have permission to reproduce this content in any other form or context.