Mountain upside down
remembering in the Grand Canyon
“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the earth.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh
It is impossible to comprehend the immensity of the challenge of the mountain upside down - the multi-layered meaning of the Paiute word “Kaibab” - before actually departing from the world above the rim. In “A Walk in the Park,” author and adventurer Kevin Fedarko says that the canyon “will strip away all of your arrogance, all of your preconceived ideas about who you are, and what you think you have, and how much you think you know.” Because of the fact that once you’ve involved yourself in this impending disintegration of the arrogance that you didn’t even realize you had up until this point, including the realization of your overestimated fitness level and miscalculated nutrition and hydration requirements, and no options for quitting or being rescued, the park service is keen to advise people not to do this.
I ran R3 (rim-to-rim-to-rim) of the Grand Canyon in 2020 with a group of friends, as my first unofficial ultra-marathon, appropriately having no idea what I was getting myself into. This unofficial event, which descends down the South Kaibab Trail, across the base of the canyon and up the North Kaibab Trail, before turning around and splitting off to ascend the Bright Angel Trail on the return trip, totals about 46 miles with 11,200 ft of elevation gain, and typically includes temperatures at or exceeding 100 degrees in the base, is easily and often underestimated.
The lowlight of my 2020 experience was characterized by a pitiful slog up the final ascent of the Bright Angel trail, in which my body was doing everything in its power to convince me to stop moving, including dropping my heart rate into the low 50’s (while hiking), and attempting to evacuate anything that might be aiding this delusional activity - food, liquid, unresolved childhood trauma, etc. - out of itself in the form of near continuous diarrhea. I would have delighted in obliging my body in its request to discontinue movement, except for the unfortunate circumstance that I had to get myself out of the canyon.
Needless to say, I was heading into round 2 with a fair amount of fear in tow. As much as I wanted to be able to experience the purity of the canyon through the best way I’ve learned how since my last encounter, in a fashion similar to the erosion that time has enacted upon the rock walls of the canyon, I desperately did not want to repeat the diarrhea death march that I experienced last time.
Therefore, in the lead-up to round 2 of R3, I spent a lot of time considering the intentionality I wanted to cultivate, especially to approach the Grand Canyon in as much humility as I was capable of mobilizing. Fitness, although necessarily included, had very little to do with what I thought would be necessary to meet the challenge of my intention. If I had responded to the call to return to the canyon with a strategy for doubling down on my hardball approach from last time, I knew that foolhardy intention would be reflected back to me by an animate force of nature whose vastness in both size and scale would register my proposal as nothing more than a riotous grain of sand or a jumpy fraction of a microsecond on the unimaginable scale of geological time.
In my preparation, I learned that there are 11 Native American tribes that have deep ancestral ties to the Grand Canyon. I learned about the many different species of fungi, plants, and animals which are arrayed amongst the various elevation zones, each with its own climate considerations, including ⅓ of the entire spectrum of birds in the continental US, and 140 different types of butterfly, 5 of which are unique to the canyon.
The Colorado River, which runs at its longest section for 277 miles from Lees Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs, spent roughly 6 million years carving out the chasm. And the mile deep walls feature more than 20 distinct layers of rock formations that span 8 geological periods. Dropping into the mile deep abyss is entering into a time machine, with each descending layer older than the one on top of it. It’s a literal encounter with what geologists refer to as deep time.
And finally, to round out my research, I even took a brief but exciting detour down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole about how ancient Egyptians or perhaps aliens left petroglyphs in one of the thousands of caves inside the canyon walls; information which has apparently been covered up by the Smithsonian. I’m still un-doing the algorithmic carnage brought forth by this diversion.
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In 2020, I was fully invested in my own capacity as an endurance athlete. My goals were centered on my achievements and in learning who I was through my capacity to endure. If suffering is inevitable on this human journey, I wanted to know it intimately. Moving directly towards difficulty is a powerful skill but if all you have is a hammer, then you’re likely to become increasingly flattened. And besides, it was never enough to fill the canyon-like abyss that continued to drive me.
I had all sorts of backup plans laid out. I paid for a nonrefundable 4.5 hour shuttle ride from the north rim back to the south rim in case I ran all the way across and felt like that was a sufficient ordeal for one day. I also knew I could turn around at any point before reaching the north rim. And then there was the option of joining the “fun group,” who were the delightful glow-stick ornamented partition of our Grand Canyon adventuring friends who had planned to run down the South Kaibab trail, stop and have breakfast at Phantom Ranch, and then proceed back up to the south rim via the Bright Angel Trail. This “minimal” version is still just shy of a marathon with 5k feet of elevation gain. But because I had not yet journeyed into the womb of the earth to be reborn into something less rigidly inclined towards exhaustion and difficulty, fun was not yet a well integrated part of my nature, and none of these backup options felt inspiring enough to commit to.
The day before the adventure, I sat on the edge of the rim and enacted a small ceremony to call in the directions and make an offering to the mother canyon, which was received immediately with roaring winds emanating through her walls. At 2am the next morning, I loaded my pack full of enough calories for an unknown amount of time (a gross overcompensation from last time), duck-taped 2 bags of potato chips to my hiking poles, and plastered a few mounds of glitter to my face in order to be presentable enough to be welcomed by the shimmering landscape. At 3am, 6 of us set off down the South Kaibab trail amid a star soaked moonless sky.
I felt uneasy dropping 5,000 feet into the earth. The trail was dry and we were each swallowing the dust kicked up by the surprising amount of other adventurers who also thought it was a good idea to set off into the great abyss in the middle of the night. I compulsively inhaled fluid in order to mitigate the unease, which is the exact opposite of how my body would prefer I behave since I’m much more prone to hyponatremia than dehydration.
It was already warm on the way down and we anticipated temperatures would exceed 100 degrees by mid day, becoming especially oppressive in “the box” which is the 4 mile segment where the walls of the canyon rise up narrowly on either side of the trail, trapping the heat in a head-exploding cacophony of distress related symptoms.
We began to slowly spread out a bit winding through the base as the sun slowly crept up towards the horizon, emanating tones of powder blue and mauve across the sky. Through the box, the previous night’s celestial current faded back behind the veil of sunlight and we were welcomed onto the spreading terrain by the liquid melodies of canyon wren and even the soft toned trill of a raven that stopped me in my tracks to identify the artist. Although similar in appearance, the raven’s song echoed out in sweet contrast to the harsh caws and cackles of my neighborhood crows, who regularly announce their reigning supremacy over the banal authority of the HOA, rendering the organization insufficient to the task of responding to complaints such as the one sent in by a woman who wanted an end to the birds noisily breaking peanuts on her roof.
While Kendra indulged our modest pace for a short while, she was now long gone up the trail. Brendan was shortly behind her, and I was now happily running with Sarah, my running buddy from The Snow Mountain Ranch 50k last September.
But as we neared the final 2 water stops before the official start of the climb up to the north rim, a crucial decision point was rapidly approaching and my mind was racing between all of my options. It bothered me immensely to find myself making a choice that seemed at the time to be based on fear, and though I have little to no experience choosing not to go directly towards my fears, I am also benevolently incapable of choosing against my intuition. So at the Manzanita water stop, 5 miles short of the peak of the north rim, I decided to turn back. When I informed Sarah of my decision, we just looked into each other's eyes for a moment, both of us dispirited by this turn of events.
On the 10 mile trek back to Phantom Ranch, including the 4 miles through the box, I ran appropriately through mostly shadows, as the last remnants of this iteration of my ego decalcified and loosened their tendrils from the dark, previously unexplored floor of my subconscious. I even stepped in a pile of human shit on a short detour to the river. Although the light of the sun was clear and visible, it dispassionately withheld its warming rays from my skin. The part of the canyon that was supposed to have been unmanageably hot was callously and uncomfortably pleasant. Later, when we had all finished and were recounting our journeys, Sarah confirmed the head-exploding temperatures and reported to have died a thousand deaths.
I felt horrible for abandoning my friend (for her sake and mine). I felt like I was falling short of the requirements of being a good coach, of which qualities I was now untangling, were tightly wound in the imperative to lead by example of how to persevere and press through difficulty at every turn. Meanwhile, one of my collaborators was hanging out in the fun group taking a photo shoot with a pumpkin and leading his group through a letting go ritual, and I sincerely could not be more proud and inspired by the authenticity and drive towards freedom that he lives by.
And finally, as is now a customary part of every endurance adventure I partake in, I felt completely inadequate to the task of taking part in story that I could be worthy of telling, especially one as magnificent as the Grand Canyon.
I can now more clearly see that the moment of surrender, the unavoidable passage through any endurance challenge - physical or otherwise - must be the part of the journey where the story you hoped you were going to tell breaks down entirely. In the midst of the breakdown, your role is to do nothing more and nothing less than to heed the advice of the final words of the Buddha to his disciples: “Walk on.”
I reached Phantom Ranch in about a marathon’s worth of distance and had to wait in a long line for lemonade. Even though I was eager to get back onto the trail, Phantom Ranch lemonade is an obligatory part of any below-the-rim adventure so I exercised some patience (still a burgeoning skill for me) and spent about 30-40 minutes at the only stop in the canyon which features more than a seasonal water spigot.
True to its metaphorical predilection for transmuting sour into sweet, the lemonade marked the turning point in which, now absolved from all of my uninspiring ego afflictions, I was now eligible to be with things as they are, which is always extraordinarily superior to how I thought I wanted them to be. I walked slowly across the bridge over the Colorado River, taking it all in, finally mellowed out enough to settle into the liminality that this world underneath the world has to offer.
For the tribes that call this place home, the Grand Canyon is the place of their origin, and it is where they return when they die. It’s the cosmic womb; the eternal and loving void space of the Mother Earth. I could sense this ancient truth even in my last encounter before I learned about these perspectives, but I was still too concerned with my only available tool, and I couldn’t slow myself down to melt into it.
Indigenous origin stories are not metaphorical; they’re experiential. They’re meant to be ritually enacted in order to bridge the distinction between symbol and reality, in order to participate in the necessary ongoing creation of the universe. Rituals don’t just mean something, they are something, and we require their physicality for our own ongoing evolution as well.
Womb time, unlike chronological time, moves in many directions all at once. Traversing up and down the exposed layers of time carved into rock, we can simultaneously move backward in time, forward in space, and across seasonal landscape in a dynamic motion that is provocatively contradictory with linear progression.
In and out of the angled autumn light, I flowed around the twisting and rolling terrain of the beginning miles of the Bright Angel Trail, before it leans back for a final time, signaling the beginning of the 5,000 foot vertical ascent back to the south rim. By this point, I had consumed enough anxiety hydration to not need much else besides the extracellular fluid that was already swimming around inside me.
As the pre-born beings of multidimensional cosmic womb soup, before we breach the surface and enter the world of linear time, the Great Mother provides everything we need, and we are humble by nature. We don’t even have to breathe our own breath, pump our own blood, or eat our own food. The rhythmic beating of our mother’s heart sings us slowly into being, until the inevitable moment where we become too ripe to continue gestating in this mythological time bath any longer. It is then that we begin the climb into the next world.
I began climbing at a consistent and steady pace, without much need for pausing. For a few miles, the terrain was rocky and barren, and the midday desert sun was clarifying and direct, drying up any potential sprouts of extracurricular mind weeds at the source. The miles passed by at the exact pace that miles were seemingly meant to pass by, not too slowly and not too quickly. And when the time was right, which it continued to be, I came upon Havasupai Gardens, named accordingly after the people of the blue green waters, where the season unassumingly shifted into lush springtime greenery.
Cottonwoods rose up from beside the trickling stream-lining trail, providing some temporary shade. I momentarily stood in wonder, unknowingly mistaking a row of canyon plumes for a plant that had come to my rescue in the middle of a rocky plant medicine ceremony, feeling exalted and graced by its presence. Upon returning home to find that my rescuer friend grows nowhere near the Grand Canyon, I have concluded that this newly acquired information is broadly irrelevant.
I continued on at the impeccably orchestrated cadence of my footsteps, feeling for one of the rare moments in my life, neither like I wanted time to move faster nor slower than it was. I realized that I had never seen the last 3-4 miles of the Bright Angel trail in daylight, and without thinking, I recognized the precise spot from which to retrieve the soul fragment I had left behind there 4 years ago. Even though there has always been a piece of me that has felt more comfortable between the worlds, it was time to come home.
It is more difficult than most of us anticipate to birth ourselves into this world. There is no way to prepare for the human experience, which involves the daunting task of forgetting who we are and where we come from. In “The Smell of Rain on Dust,” indigenous shaman and storyteller, Martin Prechtel, reminds us that our first song upon entering this world is a cry of grief for what we’ve left behind.
For a reason that felt more like gratitude than grief, although there is no substantive boundary between them, some of my still abundant excess body fluid began exiting out of my eyes. It was a necessary exchange, in order to make as much room as possible to visually ingest the exceeding beauty in every direction. The gentle wind carried the warm but fleeting touch of autumn. The grandeur of the rock formations and the slowly receding ambiance of the river below sparkled in gestures of surety and wisdom that can only be expressed in tone. And perhaps my favorite quality, the one that restores every inch of my spirit back to life - the permeating silence that can only be found deep in nature - was wholly encapsulating.
The canyon’s austere propensity for stripping away the arrogance of eager adventure-seekers appears aloof to the aspirations of her visitors, but only when we neglect our responsibility to ritually remember our origins.
My own internal grand canyon has mirrored these indifferences - inexhaustibly and radiantly empty - no matter how much I’ve tried to subdue the gnawing apparency of the vacancy, whether through various addictions, endless aspirations, even benign adventure-seeking that would leave me fulfilled for a brief while before needing more to feel satisfied again.
Martin Prechtel says that the place of our origin “remains a force that unconsciously nags us, just beyond the grasp of our memory. It is a source of constant dissatisfaction and unhappiness to the over-civilized who want to remember but cannot, and therefore seek satisfaction in lesser directions.”
Humility comes from the root word humus, which means ground, soil, or of the earth. It’s the stuff we are made of. But because we are creatures prone to forgetting, I have found it to be crucially restorative to experientially remind myself where the ground is. It is almost always further down and more shadowy than I anticipate, but is one of the most reliable technologies I know for helping me become a being who contributes more life energy than I consume.
I thought I had to learn this through suffering only, and I’m sure I’ll still employ that well honed hammer from time to time, but suffering is inherently selfish. It is certainly unavoidable at times, but its focus is restricted inward and therefore it is limited in its capacity to truly witness the other.
As the sun began to fall below the horizon, a few of us returned to the edge of the rim to midwife our friends through their difficult reemergence into the world. We stayed for hours, enthusiastically welcoming and congratulating each and every freshly rebirthed hiker for their successful passage back to the world above the rim. Dirt-caked and occasionally bloody, many of them allowed any remaining fluid which had not been grieved out through their sweat, to now begin exiting from their eyes. Though exhausted and newly humbled, they exuded an unmistakeable glow that can only be known through direct experiential remembering that it is a miracle to walk on the earth.
💚
Coach Laura
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