Arizona Hiking: Three miles into the Grand Canyon

This is the third and final installment recapping my weekend at the Grand Canyon. If you’ve been following, you know I’m running on less than an hour of sleep at this point. Luckily, I have pretty good mental fortitude and this isn’t even close to the longest I’ve been without sleep. (For the record, it’s nearly 40 hours when I was at summer camp up by Yosemite.)

Anyways, after we packed up at Mater Point, we drove over to Bright Angel Lodge and the more recognizable part of the South Rim.

After a couple photos here and there, we began to three-mile walk down at around 6:40am. The end goal, as the name suggests, was the three-mile house.

As most will tell you, going down is the easy part – especially when you’re photographer-in-chief. It took us about 80 mins to get down to the turnaround-point thanks to me wanting to stop and take pictures every 10-feet. #SorryNotSorry

I’m usually a pretty fast hiker so it’s nice to be able to savor the finer points of the trail and scenery that you’d usually blow right past. I don’t want to say the camera has helped make me be more observant, but it has definitely made me appreciate nature a little more.

After an hour and seventeen minutes on the trail, we reached the three-mile house. To get an even better view, we went a little bit past it out to the cliff’s edge, took a seat, and started munching away our snacks. As my father’s son, it’s no surprise that I’m always eating. Today’s treat, trail mix, was pretty light due to the shortness of hike we were on.

But the view from our perch was magnificent. We were situated on a jagged edge with one side owning a couple hundred foot drop off that ever so often made our stomachs churn.

Once we had had enough of nature… just kidding, that could never happen, we packed up and started the three-mile accent up. Our goal? Be up in 1 hour.

I got damn close. Anthony beat it.

I finished the three-miles of switchbacks at 1 hour and 2 minutes. Anthony crushed it at 58 and change. (I’ll partially blame my snapchat/instagram documentation of the hike.)

Overall, it was amazing being back at the Grand Canyon, someplace I hadn’t been since I did down and up on Halloween of 2015.

With the weather warming up in the valley, trips to the Arizona high country will be more and more frequent – which means plenty of adventures await.

Until next time adventurers, take care and be safe.

You can follow along the journey on Facebook and Instagram or shoot me any questions and comments about places to go. And don’t forget to subscribe to the blog to get notified when new posts come out!