Hiking the Grand Canyon by John Annerino

Author:John Annerino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

“Navajo brave and his mother,” Timothy H. O’Sullivan stereoview, 1873, Library of Congress.

The Escalante Route/Blessingway Trail

The Escalante Route begins at the foot of the Tanner Trail near Tanner Rapids on the Colorado River at Mile 68.5, Elevation 2,650 feet (808 meters), Dox Sandstone. Named for Spanish missionary explorer Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, the ten-mile point-to-point route leads west along the Colorado River and Escalante Route to the foot of the Hance Trail. On the run from Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson’s merciless Long Walk campaign, Navajo elders, men, women, and children—herding goats and sheep—first used this remote route that should be renamed the Navajo Trail or Blessingway Trail to reach the safety of Indian Garden in 1864. (See page 165 Tanner Trail.)

Tanner Canyon to Red Canyon

At one time the three-mile stretch between the mouth of Tanner Canyon and Cardenas Creek was a faint path. But so many river runners have hiked it over the years, it is now a distinct trail. From Tanner Canyon the trail heads west along the bench above the river to Cardenas Creek. Summertime temperatures along this stretch have been recorded reaching 140 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in the name “Furnace Flats.” From Cardenas Creek bed (normally dry), follow the mile-long river runner’s trail 400 vertical feet up to Cardenas Hilltop Ruin. Civil engineer–turned-boatman Robert Brewster Stanton thought he first discovered the stone masonry dwelling on January 23, 1890, during his second disaster-plagued Denver, Colorado, Canyon and Pacific Railroad expedition through the Grand Canyon. So the Mississippi-born river man called it “Stanton’s Fort.” But two of Major John Wesley Powell’s 1871–72 Second Expedition members first noted the dwelling eight years earlier. On August 27, Walter Powell and Almon H. Thompson reportedly “… climbed a peak about 500 feet high … Found an old stone house evidently built by the Sto-ce nee nas [Cosninas].” Judging from its commanding 360-degree view, some profess the Ancestral Puebloan dwelling was a place of vision quest. But the late anthropologist Robert C. Euler suggested it “… lies on what probably was a cross-canyon trail from the Pueblo villages in the Unkar [Delta] vicinity up to the South Rim of the canyon … and about 1100–1150 and [it] may have been a “lookout” if not a defensive unit.”

If you lie on your stomach you’ll get a head-spinning, raptor’s view of Unkar Rapids 337 vertical feet below. When Welshman Colin Fletcher first backpacked this route in 1966 during the first modern trans canyon crossing of the Grand Canyon for his book The Man Who Walked Through Time, the Colorado River was a veritable trickle at 1,260 cfs (cubic feet per second). The flow was low enough for him to walk along the east bank of Unkar Rapids at river level. But chances are the Colorado River won’t be low enough to walk the riverside stretch if you were thinking about retracing Fletcher’s route. The river flow wasn’t low enough when I first trod the route. From the Unkar overlook, I followed a faint trail up

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