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Started reading
October 3, 2024
There was, for example, the afternoon I tripped and fell into a cactus, and the night that I unwittingly unfurled my sleeping bag atop an anthill—which happened to be the very same evening that Pete and I toppled into the Colorado River with our backpacks. Or the morning after the snowstorm when I was trying to thaw out my frozen shoes with our camp stove, and accidentally set them on fire.
Dude. How accident prone are you.
But then, I admit, having given the matter due consideration, Pete and I now agree (and perhaps you will, too) that the moment the wheels completely fell off the bus was probably when the rat burrowed under Pete’s skin and started snacking on his intestines.
Wut.
The lump was about the size of a Bushy-Tailed Woodrat, a mammal renowned for its foul temper and a fondness for lining its nest with cactus spines, and it probably stands as a testament to just how poorly I was dealing with the whole situation that for several long seconds I found myself wondering exactly how an actual rat—a live rodent—had managed to tunnel his way beneath Pete’s skin.
I mean. That seems like a fair question.
What appeared to be a rat scurrying beneath his skin was a rolling series of intense muscle cramps.
Ah. See, that makes more sense. Really should get that man to a doctor if he's hit that level of sick.
Instead of fishing out some moleskin from our med kit, which I was too exhausted to extract from the bottom of my pack, I decided that if I ignored the problem, it would either get better or go away.
So...you're just fucking stupid, then.
Ours was a conflation of willful ignorance, shoddy discipline, and outrageous hubris:
At least you admit it
a carnivorous mouse that specializes in consuming scorpions and howls at the moon.
How has that not been made into a cartoon superhero yet
In 1958, having drifted to San Francisco and taken a job as a janitor, he decided it would be a good idea to hike the length of California—all the way from Mexico to Oregon along the spine of the Sierra Nevada—to figure out whether he should propose to his girlfriend.
Bro. If you have to spend months hiking the Sierras to decide if you should propose, you pretty obviously don't actually want to marry the girl
Partly because many of our clients were older or had little experience moving over uneven terrain (and partly because we boatmen, for the most part, weren’t exactly CrossFit endurance athletes ourselves), these sojourns were usually brief, never more than a few hours ambling in shorts and sandals, with each person clutching a sandwich and a single bottle of water. Although some of those hikes could feel ambitious and rugged, especially during the heat of midsummer, I had no sense of just how limited they were: how little we had seen, and how negligibly we had penetrated into the rock, when the
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So...you were a moron.
after attending an expensive Ivy League college without having bothered to take a single course in photojournalism, he intended to become a photographer in the world of outdoor adventure. Over the next several years, he barnstormed from one continent to the next on a series of assignments for magazines such as National Geographic, trekking from the mountains of Bhutan to the high deserts of the Andes, kayaking along the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, and walking the rainforests of the Amazon, where an eight-foot-long electric eel once shimmied between his legs. He visited more than
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Also the ability of privileged white boys to fail up
In keeping with every other proposition that he’d dangled in front of me, he made it sound as if nothing could possibly go wrong.
Maybe, but you're the idiot who kept listening to him
Rich, however, had something different in mind: a route whose appeal resided in its audacity and elegance. His vision was to ascend into the world of pure stone and tease out a route along the loftiest cliffs and ledges that would enable him to shift into overdrive by gliding across the bare slickrock for weeks at a stretch, suspended in the bright between: thousands of feet off the river, thousands of feet below the rim, cutting through country with neither boatmen, rangers, or any other people—only light and rock, and the desert creatures who dwelled in that rarefied realm.
So...he had a death wish.
Over several years, he’d applied himself to translating that vision into a plan by poring over maps and pulling down hundreds of satellite images from Google Earth. Slowly he added in new layers of detail—noting terrain features, measuring distances, estimating travel times—until the plan came to fruition in the form of a seven-hundred-mile course that was overlaid against a fifty-seven-day itinerary. He knew the escarpments and hollows where he would camp, the ledges that would enable him to make forward progress, and the geological breaks that would permit him to shift from one layer of rock
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Oh, ok. This is a dude who actually knows what he's doing. Did not expect Pete to know a guy who actually knows what he's doing.
As usual, Pete was in charge of logistics,
As usual? USUAL? You ALWAYS let this idiot plan shit? HOW HAVE YOU NOT LEARNT?
Instead of concluding that the two approaches were totally incompatible, however, Pete latched on to another idea altogether: Apparently, there was a shortcut! If Rich could somehow be talked into allowing us to accompany him and his team on the first part of their trip, it would both cushion and accelerate our own acclimation to the canyon. Wasting no time, Pete emailed Rich the very next day and announced that we wanted to tag along.
If Rich has any brain at all, he'll tell you no.
“So what do you think?” Rich asked after phoning Rink and laying out what was going on. Rink didn’t hesitate. “You’re being stupid,” he growled, incredulous that Rich was even considering the idea. “Do not bring those two idiots with you.” “Why not?” “Because they will fuck up your entire trip.”
Smart man.
A few days later, Pete phoned me to deliver the news. Despite having been advised by one of the canyon’s most respected elder statesmen to drop us like a hot rock, Rich had abandoned his judgment, along with any shred of common sense, and given us permission to join his team for the first phase of their trip.
I need the ability to use a facepalm emoji on Kindle
In the interest of accuracy, balance, and maintaining my friendship with Pete, I’m compelled to disclose that he takes exception to the manner in which we have been depicted up to now.
Of course he does. He's a moron. A shining example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The glare of the headlamps also enabled them to get a good look at us, and what grabbed their attention immediately was Pete’s photography equipment, which was mixed up with everything else. He was militant about carrying a backup for every piece of gear he used, so he had brought double the amount he needed: two high-tech digital cameras capable of shooting video as well as still shots, each worth $8,000; eight battery packs to run the cameras, plus four sets of solar panels to charge the batteries, four lenses, a pair of tripods, and an assortment of cables and tools. The entire kit weighed
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Oh my god. Fucker, I don't carry that much crap with me when I'm DRIVING. Four lenses when I'm CITY travelling is a bit much. I'll often leave one or two in the hotel to lighten up my bag so it doesn't slow me down. In the BACKWOODS? No way. One body. Two lenses. For the canyon, I'd have probably gone wide angle prime and superzoom, but I could see an argument for other set-ups. Either way, no more than two. Throw in ONE extra battery and the solar charger. MAYBE a tiny bottle of lens cleaner and a lens cloth. Maybe. They'd be the first things to get ditched if I decided I was carrying too much.
Best part: being forced to carry a minimal kit MAKES YOU A BETTER PHOTOGRAPHER. Anyone carrying 28 pounds of professional gear into some of the most stunning natural landscapes on earth can get good photos. Skill comes in when you're working with limitations.
Mike now stopped with the questions and started seizing anything he found offensive—a glass jar of instant coffee; a foldable camp chair; a plastic shovel that one of us had brought along, for God knows what reason—and tossing it onto a rapidly growing reject pile. This must have felt like progress, until he realized that Pete and I were surreptitiously snatching back items that we couldn’t bear to part with, so Mike simply began hurling things off into the night.
Mike has a brain. Also, you brought the shovel to dig cat holes. It won't work in hard desert rock, but at least one of you read a basic backwoods guide.
My pack tipped the scale at just over fifty-three pounds. His was fifty-five.
You're both going to die.
Only later would it dawn on me that two middle-aged men were about to head out with as much weight as my dad had carried as a nineteen-year-old marine in full combat gear during boot camp.
Yeah, sounds about right.
“Dude, chill, gaiters make you look stupid. Forget about them.”
I know the universe is not fair because Pete isn't the one who ended up with shredded feet.
For Mike, the incompetency he’d witnessed defied belief—never before had he encountered such cluelessness on the threshold of a major expedition. But for Chris and Dave, a more complicated response was unfolding as they both realized that Rich may not have been entirely honest with them about how inexperienced Pete and I were—and that perhaps Rich had purposely withheld this information until it was too late to do anything about it.
Not too late. Ditch 'em. They've got a truck right there. Say "nope, sorry boys, I can't in good conscience take the pair of you out to die."
“We may have some rough moments with these guys over the next few days, but we’ll get them sorted out,” Rich assured them. “So trust me—it’ll be okay, and everything will work out just fine.”
Rich what the hell.
Unfortunately, Pete and I were so disorganized that we were forced to dump our belongings on the ground and reorganize everything several times before we were ready to get going. As a result, our group didn’t arrive at the Ferry until just before 9:00 a.m., having frittered away the coolest part of the morning, the best time for hiking.
I would've left your asses behind.
Listening to this exchange, I couldn’t help but wonder if a message was being transmitted—and if so, how Pete and I should react (although one fitting response, certainly, would have been for us to depart immediately for the Appalachian Trail).
Yes. That would have been a better plan. You still would've been wildly unprepared, but at least there are other people on the AT.
By now, poor Dave could restrain his anxiety no longer. The temperature had broken into the nineties, ten degrees above normal for this time of year. To stay on schedule, we would have to cover nine river miles in the eight hours of daylight that remained before the sun went down. The fact that everyone was still standing around the boat ramp jabbering away and posing for photographs was absurd.
I feel Dave's pain
“How much longer…,” he finally said, the words emerging in staccato bursts between ragged gasps for air, “do you think it’ll be… before these guys… stop for a snack?”
...They're not gonna. Eat while you hike, idiot.
My last thought was that after such an unspeakably brutal induction, it only made sense for us to take a day off to rest and recover. We’d sleep in until ten o’clock, have a leisurely breakfast, and after that there would be plenty of time for the six of us to gather in a circle to share our feelings, explore our emotions, and discuss how to dial back the mileage and the pace to something more manageable.
Dude. There is no dialling back. You have limited food and water and you're already behind schedule. Suck it up.
Rich, however, held back to keep an eye on us—a gesture of courtesy that subjected us to perhaps his most annoying trait, which was his disinterest in making any effort to curb or contain his passion for the canyon.
Rich gets points for not pushing you off a ledge.
Although it may sound bizarre, it’s just as easy to die from drinking too much water as it is from too little—and
Only if you're dumb enough to not keep loading up on snacks. Which...yeah, you two definitely are.
As we pulled ourselves to our feet, Pete and I knew that we couldn’t endure this kind of punishment much longer, and that if we were to have any hope of continuing, we needed to catch a break.
You're not continuing. Go home.
Upon arriving at the far end of the beach, just before heading into the talus, I looked back and saw the river runners raising their margarita glasses in a farewell toast. As I turned away, I could smell the steaks coming off the grill.
Seriously. This is the point at which you go "No. Nope. Not happening." and beg your way onto one of those rafts.
Rich and his crew understood exactly how dangerous it was in that zone, and as Pete and I slept, they weighed the variables that would govern our survival—dwindling food and supplies, limited water, extended exposure to lethal temperatures—and tried to calculate how those variables would play out as our strength ebbed, our spirits waned, and our pace ground to a halt. The dilemma was no less stark than the stone itself. Without a chance for rest, Pete and I would not be able to continue and survive; but once we were on the Redwall, survival would dictate that there could be no rest at all.
This is where you pull out the emergency beacon and call for a rescue whether they want it or not.
Two days earlier, Rich had quietly taken out his DeLorme and sent a satellite text to a group of friends in Flagstaff alerting them that Pete and I would probably have to be extracted from South Canyon, a tributary drainage that offered an access route to the rim. Then the previous afternoon, he’d confirmed that a rescue would be necessary. By sunset, a truck had left Flagstaff, driven by a cheerful young river guide named Jean-Philippe Clark, who had already arrived at the rim last night, via a series of remote dirt roads, and was already working his way down to the Redwall with a heavy pack
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Finally Rich does something intelligent.
“Maybe we’re being taught some kind of a lesson,” he replied. “Although I have no idea what we’re supposed to be learning, aside from the fact that we totally suck.”
Oh my god, Pete. The lesson is LEARN TO FUCKING PLAN YOU FUCKING MORON
When they were finished, his gear had been whittled down to a single camera with only two lenses, plus a solar panel to charge one set of batteries.
Lmao ways you know I spent way too much time camping and hiking as a kid
The data are irrefutable: a hiker schlepping a fifty-eight-pound pack will expend roughly the same energy over ten miles as a hiker carrying a ten-pound pack will expend in thirty miles. When it comes to load carrying, location matters, too: weight on the feet—say, boots—requires between four and six times more energy to move than the same weight on one’s back.
This is true, but I still refuse to hike without ankle support. Heavier, yes, but I've rolled an ankle one too many times to go without it.
Pulling to shore, the men raced around snatching up a dozen or so of the juiciest-looking fruits, then leaped back in their boats and scurried off before anyone could confront them. When they’d rowed far enough downstream to avoid being followed, they pulled over again, put the kettle on the fire, and concocted a batch of squash stew, which they feasted on, twice—first for lunch and then again that night for supper.
Dude wtf
