‘Let’s Talk Water:’ Backpacking the Grand Canyon’s Gems

By Michael Lanza

The April sun seems to dangle just over our heads like a giant grow light—or perhaps a very, very big and hot interrogation lamp—as we hike down the Grand Canyon’s South Bass Trail, a steep path littered with enough ankle-rolling stones to keep pulling our eyes from the unfathomable expanse of canyon beyond us back to the unstable ground at our feet. We all lumber under packs heavier than any of us usually has any reason to carry: Including more than 10 pounds of water and 11 pounds of food, mine tips the scales at around 40 pounds. Everyone else hauls a similar load.

And we will carry them thousands of feet downhill on this unkind-to-ankles footpath, eventually to search for today’s lone, uncertain source of water that we may or may not find, so that we can refill the bladders and bottles we’ve sucked empty in this desert heat, allowing us to again shoulder ungainly burdens and continue walking what will total over 14 hot miles before we set our packs down for the night.

Some backpacking trips begin with a baptism of fire in the form of a very hard first day. (The five friends with me here have shared many such days with me and they have the markers of trauma survivors to prove it.) And some trips dish out an opening day that feels like it’s about as hard as it could possibly get until you remember that the original plan included three possible scenarios for how this day could go down, and the one you ended up with—through smart planning and a little sheer luck—was actually the middle scenario: neither the hardest nor the easiest (though even that was certainly more like “least very difficult” than “easy”).

Example: today. I’ll explain in due time.

In other words, this is a glass-half-full story—or at least, I prefer seeing it that way—an apropos metaphor given that water is so scarce in this part of the Grand Canyon that, if circumstances turned dark and we chanced upon a glass half full, we just might fight to the death over it.

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My friends Todd Arndt, Mark Fenton, David Ports, and Pam and Mark Solon and I are backpacking for six days from the South Bass Trailhead to the Hermit Trailhead off the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, a distance of about 60 miles, most of that following a stretch of the Tonto Trail often informally called the Gems Route for the names of several tributary canyons along it, including five that we’ll cross: Ruby, Turquoise, Sapphire, Agate, and Topaz. (The western end of the Tonto Trail and Gems Route, which we will not reach on this trip, lies in Garnet Canyon, along another very remote and adventurous multi-day hike that David and I took several years ago, the Royal Arch Loop.)

The Gems Route happens to overlap with the longest, by far, segment of the 95-mile-long Tonto Trail with no bailout trail to the South Rim: the 29 unmaintained miles from Bass Canyon to Boucher Creek. The only ways out are humping 3,500 vertical feet up either the hard South Bass Trail or the infamously even-harder Boucher Trail.

Dice up the Tonto Trail—which follows a mid-canyon plateau, never approaching the South Rim—into sections delineated by trails that connect it to the South Rim and then walk those sections and you will see similarities, for sure, like the vibrantly kaleidoscopic carpets of wildflowers in spring and vistas stretching from the Colorado River to both rims.

But you’ll also discover that those cross-sections differ in three consequential ways: scenery, water access, and degree of remoteness and solitude.

The Tonto Trail’s ‘Most Difficult and Potentially Dangerous’ Section

The park’s website describes Bass to Boucher as the Tonto’s “most difficult and potentially dangerous” leg for the lack of perennial water sources. The only creeks are seasonal; at some point each spring, they dry up like the mouth of a severely dehydrated human shortly before the liver, kidneys, and brain shut down.

The most recent intel we have on water in the creeks that lie ahead of us is a ranger’s field report from more than a week ago. While it offers reasons for optimism, we don’t know with any certainty what we’ll find.

Given all of this, a reasonable, clear-eyed person might logically ask: “Why the hell would you…??” And that just might be the kind of question for which, if you’re asking it, you may never receive a satisfying answer.

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But for backpackers of a certain mindset (present company included), the notion of backpacking the most remote and lonely section of the Tonto Trail triggers an elevated level of excitement that helps one accept the prospect of carrying a pack laden with 10 or more pounds of water. Possibly day after day—or day after very hot day. With no one to blame but yourself. (Although, among this collection of dear friends and trusted backcountry partners, each gifted with a robust sense of humor and little to no inhibition, in a pinch, blaming me appears to bring them some cathartic benefit.)

Plus, several GC backpacking trips have ingrained in me the lesson that, contrary to the seeming ubiquity of the incomprehensible vastness splayed out before one’s eyes when looking out over the Grand Canyon from either of its rims, every one of my trips has possessed a character all its own—reflecting the canyon’s complex diversity, both subtle and substantial. I know that I can return here again and again and have an experience that delivers surprises, wonder, awe, and moments seared into memory—all of those emotional rewards that draw us to special places in nature.

I fully expect all of those rewards this week.

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The Tonto Trail, Bass Canyon to Boucher Creek

After carrying our overloaded packs for seven miles along the road to the South Bass Trailhead and descending that trail for 3,400 feet and nearly five miles—with a short break for lunch in a meager patch of shade falling off a boulder—we reach the lower of two junctions with the Tonto Trail. There, we drop our packs beside the trail, collect all of our empty bladders and bottles, and set out walking downhill in search of a spot called Bass Tanks, where water may exist in the real world or only in our hopes.

Not quite a mile farther down the South Bass Trail, we discover the answer to our question: a series of broad potholes filled with shallow pools of water in the otherwise dry creek bed. So we spend about 90 minutes in the hot sun, in a terrain depression that feels like a solar collector, filtering (and drinking) water to leave there carrying enough to get through tonight, tomorrow, and the next morning—just in case we don’t come upon water again until almost two days from now. We each leave there with seven to eight liters—up to about 17 pounds of water on our backs.

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And although we’re almost rapturous over finding water at Bass Tanks, its quality—vaguely brown in color and rich in insect protein—spawns one of a few running jokes birthed on this trip: We’ll rate every water source we come upon on our newly conceived Bass Tanks Scale, as in, “Bass Tanks was a two or three, but Sapphire and Slate are possibly sevens, Boucher is an eight, and Hermit’s a solid nine!”

To explain my earlier reference to the three possible scenarios for how our first day could have gone down, I know an experienced backpacker who hiked this same route we’re following a year ago this month and, because the road to the South Bass Trailhead was still impassably mucky for any vehicle, he started by backpacking more than 20 hot and uninteresting miles along an old dirt road just to reach the trailhead—carrying water for two days. Fortunately, we didn’t have to do that.

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Also, because I know a guy who knows someone who knows two young guys working jobs on the South Rim who were happy to pocket some extra cash shuttling us most of the way to the trailhead, we also avoided almost five hours of shuttling our two cars between our start and finish points. But we didn’t have four-wheel-drive vehicles for the last seven miles of road to the South Bass Trailhead, so we had to walk that—giving us the middle of three possible distance scenarios that we could have faced today.

Further working in our favor, we’ve arrived in the second week of April, a time when the stars normally align as closely as they ever do for this hike: Snow has melted off the South Rim, allowing the dirt road to the South Bass Trailhead to get as passable as it gets, while seasonal springs and creeks along this part of the Tonto often haven’t dried up yet and public enemy number one in the Grand Canyon—Mr. Heat—has not yet started bubbling up to the oppressive daytime highs that can appear in April and more commonly by May.

But Mr. Heat throws a wicked curve, and the canyon is his home field, so it surprised no one in this group of seasoned canyon hikers to see the forecast promising increasingly hotter days this week.

The Grand Scenic Divide

Not far east of Bass Canyon on the Tonto Trail, we finally call it a day at an obviously pre-used camp on a broad point on a long ridge named the Grand Scenic Divide. Not far beyond our camp, the ground tilts sharply downward, plunging a thousand feet to the Colorado River. Tired but not wasted by the day, we pitch tents, fire up stoves, eat dinners, and then sit around while the evening sun takes its sweet time gently basting the far side of the canyon with golden light that intensifies any color on which it settles.

Across the river, colossal rock monoliths stand in a disorderly row, separated by deep and wide chasms. Just within our view without turning our heads lie several named features: two each of temples, castles, and side canyons and at least one amphitheater, all of which would dwarf the world’s tallest skyscrapers—and that’s just within our infinitesimally tiny fragment of the entire Grand Canyon.

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Soon, a sound begins to rise from us, quickly building in volume and enthusiasm into a cascade of old memories and tales of recent adventures; of fatigue and relief that the day wasn’t even harder; of sore feet and shoulders and all of us having to stop hiking more than once today to extract some lance-like cactus needle that had penetrated a shoe to pierce flesh, leaving a few with wounds trickling blood.

We all slide chin-deep into the hot bath water of unbreakable friendships and an oceanic appreciation for the gift of sharing such an indelibly beautiful place with such good, good people.

Then we dive eagerly into yet another conversation about how to plan the next day’s water—a theme destined to resurface repeatedly all week. Someone will suddenly say, “Let’s talk water,” prompting all to drop everything else to focus full attention on our shared obsession with finding enough of it to survive. Which seems legit and spotlights how having to carry 10 to 20 pounds of this critical natural resource at times grants this topic authority to cut the line ahead of all other questions on your mind.

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Serpentine Canyon to Ruby Canyon

In glorious early-morning light that seems to make the immense landscape surrounding us even taller and deeper, we leave our camp on the Grand Scenic Divide shortly after 7 a.m., taking advantage of cooler temperatures.

Already, this most-remote section of the Tonto Trail reveals evidence of how little human traffic it receives. Cacti and other malevolent desert vegetation overgrow the trail in many places; we step over or around prickly pear cacti—many of them with luminously red or yellow flowers bursting open—and unavoidably plow through brush that soon leaves our shins so scratched they resemble a four-year-old child’s Etch-a-Sketch art.

At the rim of Ruby Canyon, I stop to slowly pan my eyes up and down it, always astonished by the size of these side canyons. We read and hear mostly about the Grand Canyon’s depth (over a mile), width (up to 18 miles), and length (277 miles). But the sense of its breadth and scale attributes just as much to some 64 tributary canyons of the Colorado within the Grand Canyon—any one of which would be the most beautiful canyon in at least 40 other states.

I turn to Todd, who’s stopped beside me, and say, “When you first get to one of these side canyons and think you’re at it, you’re not really at it yet.” “Really true,” Todd says with a nod. He and I have hiked around enough of these tributary canyons in The Big Ditch to understand that the spot directly across it from where you stand may lie only a quarter-mile away as the raven flies, but you might walk three or five trail miles to get there. And that long walk is often slowed by the need to hike carefully down and up steep canyon walls of crumbling earth and ledges of shattered rock.

If every land mass on Earth resembled the Grand Canyon, we bipedal primates might never have evolved.

We arrive at Ruby Canyon at lunchtime to the happy sight of clear water in shallow potholes and a small but steady flow upstream from the trail crossing, convincing us to make our home for the night in the empty tent sites on a shelf above the creek bed. In late afternoon, Todd, David, Fenton and I explore more than a mile up the shaded canyon, below burnt umber cliffs soaring hundreds of feet overhead, immersing ourselves within the enormity of the relatively small world of this obscure and remote chasm, one of dozens of tributary canyons within the far larger world of the Grand Canyon.

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Ruby Canyon to Sapphire Canyon

In the darkness of early morning, before anyone has risen, I’m awakened by the sound of wind and light showers that last about an hour; when daylight arrives, we’ll see a dusting of snow on cliffs just below the South Rim, before it melts. Yes, it does occasionally rain and snow in the Grand Canyon. The shower cools the air and leaves a merciful breeze in its wake that accompanies us on the steep climb out of Ruby Canyon, the Tonto Trail again weaving up through a maze of ledges and cacti to the plateau.

About an hour past Ruby, David and I stop to enjoy the view from a rock ledge at the brink of the void more than a thousand feet above the brown Colorado. The morning light conducts its daily ritual of marching like a vast army of ants over the landscape. Since my first hike in the canyon more than three decades ago, I’ve always been hypnotized by how, as the sun inches across the sky, shadows appear unpredictably across terrain so vertiginous and multi-dimensional that the moving light plays tricks on the eyes, constantly appearing to rearrange the landscape in a shell game with topography.

If you blindfolded yourself and sat down for an hour or two, then pulled off the blindfold, you might understandably wonder, “How did I get here?”

At Turquoise Creek, we find pools but no longer the flowing water that a ranger reported 10 days ago. We’d planned to camp here tonight but decide to push on a few miles to Sapphire Creek because we know today will be the coolest day of the week and we’re facing hotter days ahead.

At Sapphire, we find what, out here, feels like a desert oasis: a small but flowing creek and several large pools along it, the deepest nearly a foot. We all lie down in cool but not frigid downstream pools. The wind kicks up and we watch another sunset paint the canyon in a steadily shifting lightscape for a couple of hours.

In the two days since turning off the South Bass Trail, we’ve seen no other people out here.

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Sapphire Canyon to Topaz Canyon

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a desert night as calm and serene as last night,” Mark Solon says to me after we rise with first light at around 5 a.m. on our fourth morning, everyone eager to start hiking before that hothead Mr. Heat crashes our party. Sleeping under the stars, we saw yet another vivid star show after the moon set, the Milky Way looking almost like a puddle of spilt milk streaked across the sky.

Leaving Sapphire Canyon, the Tonto Trail winds upward, throwing mysteries at us as we try to discern the route in places where it disappears on the ground. Where the trail scales the canyon walls, we find small cairns often enough to stay on course. But on the Tonto Plateau, where cairns lie farther apart and the path grows faint or just evaporates, we occasionally lose it. Then our phone-based digital maps steer us back on course.

If the Tonto Trail could be said to have a mind, you can learn to read its mind and understand where it will lead—quickly discerning, for starters, that if you turn up or down a dry wash, you are going the wrong way. On the plateau (as opposed to when zigzagging up and down canyon walls), the trail almost always meanders along or close to a contour, finding the path of least resistance. Still, we learn not to assume that it will never choose a path of maximum resistance because, now and then, that assumption sets you up for maximum disappointment.

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At Slate Creek, we find pools up to several inches deep of the clearest water we’ve seen so far by walking just minutes upstream from the trail crossing. We huddle, eating lunch and chugging water, in a patch of “hard shade” below a rock ledge that’s three to four feet wide when we arrive in mid-morning and shrinks to nothing as the sun reaches its apex directly overhead at midday.

Driven off by Mr. Heat, we hike another few miles, carrying extra water to camp out on the Tonto Plateau again. We first stop at flat spots that have obviously been used by backpackers, but by late afternoon move on a half-mile farther to flat ground that’s already in shade hours sooner than our first spot will be.

In early evening, two backpackers pass by heading in the opposite direction and we exchange waves and a little trail beta with the first people we’ve seen in three days. Another calm, mild night of a dense Milky Way settles in.

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Topaz Canyon to Monument Canyon

The morning light flits from the top layers of one gargantuan rock wall to the next in its ritual of the ages, slowly bringing the canyon’s complex geology to life again, as we depart camp in staggered starts beneath a sky achingly blue with downy wisps of high clouds, everyone hiking before 7 a.m. to get a head start on the heat.

As it does along much of its length, the Tonto Trail repeatedly brings us near the brink of the cliffs that drop a vertical quarter-mile to the Colorado, which glows in the low-angle sunlight between the black walls of the canyon’s Inner Gorge. We descend into and cross Topaz Canyon, then start walking upstream along Boucher Creek, a perennial waterway lined with greenery, with some of the clearest water we’ve seen. We pass campsites flanked by near cliffs that must keep this canyon bottom in shade for hours a day—prime Grand Canyon real estate.

We part ways with Mark Fenton and David, who are hiking out today via the steep and rough Boucher Trail, while the Solons, Todd, and I will continue to Monument Creek for our final backcountry night.

Passing one backpacker on the Tonto between Boucher and Hermit, we reach perennial Hermit Creek, the largest on our route, which nurtures a lush garden at the bottom of its steep-walled, narrow canyon. We walk several minutes downstream to the four-foot waterfall pouring between two boulders into a pool probably chest-deep and 15 feet across—possibly one of the Grand Canyon’s finest swimming holes.

 

Departing the shrinking shade of Hermit Canyon near midday, we make the final push to Monument Creek under the withering sun. Before getting there, though, we spot a nondescript but elevated patch of rocks and dirt on the Tonto Plateau, large and flat enough for our tents, with a view stretching from the Colorado River to both rims. Walking off the trail to stand there, we immediately agree it’s the ideal grand 360 for our last night.

Leaving most of our stuff there, we hike down to Monument Creek, relaxing for a few hours where the creek pours through a water-smoothed stone flume in the deeply shaded canyon bottom, rinsing the dirt and dust off ourselves as best we can, hydrating, and eating dinner before returning to our camp with enough water for tomorrow’s hike out.

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To cap off another memorable day—as well as an outstanding adventure in weather just about as good as you can get in the Grand Canyon, with some unreliable water sources that turned out to be in a condition that made our trip safer, on a little-traveled trail with scenery to rival anywhere in the canyon—we sit through the absorbingly quiet evening looking downstream and watching the sun’s slow descent.

The walls of the Inner Gorge darken even as the river continues to hold the sky’s glow as if emitting its own light. The crowns of massive towers and clifftops also glow softly with the fading daylight, seeming to float atop a sea of dim, featureless gray, their bottom geologic layers already in darkness. The last light departs the canyon rims like a giant condor lifting off in silent flight, leaving the sweep of canyon within our view immersed in rapidly diminishing dusk while tendrils of high clouds cling to the residual yellows, oranges, and reds of this evening against the deepening blue—until they, too, lose their fleeting grip on the sun.

Humans dream of holding the sunlight in our hands, but only the clouds and landscape-scale geologic features possess that power.

I wonder how many hundreds of millions of sunsets just like this one have transpired over this canyon, unobserved by people, and how many will follow long after people are gone. Human presence here will be the equivalent of one of these sunsets.

When this day finally joins the past, we smile and sigh and say the things people say when nature has given them a rare window onto perfection. Then we lay out pads and bags on the hardpan dirt and pebbles to sleep beneath another audience with the galaxy.

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The Hermit Trail

The air temperature at 4:30 a.m. is so mild, probably in the high 50s, that we don’t even need puffy jackets while eating breakfast and loading our packs by headlamp in the dark. With the goal of accomplishing as much as possible of our huge climb out of the canyon in shade and cooler temperatures, we’re all hiking well before 6 a.m., gaining elevation at seemingly about the same speed as the rising sun ladles out its enchanting light over the canyon around, below, and above us.

Our early-start strategy will pay even bigger dividends than expected: We’ll hike almost the entire distance to the Hermit Trailhead accompanied by moderate temperatures and in the shade of Hermit Canyon’s soaring walls—even as the Hermit Trail displays its many personalities, ranging from the strenuous switchbacks through the Cathedral Stairs to the long, barely uphill traverses nearly on a contour for several minutes at a time. We walk upward through evidence of unfathomable periods of geologic time: the Redwall Limestone, Supai Formation, Coconino Sandstone, and the canyon’s top-most layer, the Kaibab Formation.

Today, as expected, delivers our most encounters with other people on this trip, but only about 20—a very tiny fraction of the number of hikers we’d see on the park’s most popular trails. Bringing us back to the question of solitude on the Gems Route.

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Including about three full days without seeing any other people along the Tonto Trail, over the entire six days, we encountered approximately 40 other backpackers and dayhikers, half of them in the last two or three hours of the trip, on the upper Hermit Trail—exactly, of course, where we’d expect to see other people, not far from a trailhead reached by park shuttle buses. That’s the number of hikers you’d normally encounter within five minutes at Phantom Ranch, Havasupai Gardens, or on the upper South Kaibab or Bright Angel trails during daytime hours in the peak seasons of spring and fall.

Omit that concentration of hikers at the end of our trip and we ran into an average of just over three people per day or one person every three miles. I have rarely experienced that much solitude backpacking anywhere in the Grand Canyon—even on some of its most remote and difficult routes, like the Escalante Route to the Tanner Trail, the Royal Arch Loop, and the Thunder River-Deer Creek Loop—an observation particularly shocking in that this is the second week of April, a peak time of year to be here.

There you have it: Backpacking the Gems Route from South Bass to Hermit offers the promise of the consummate Grand Canyon experience—including the full value in difficulty.

And if you consider doing it, then seriously: Let’s talk water.

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