|
Trip Report - September, 1991 - Grandview Trail |
|---|
|
We got up the next morning and the ankle looked no better and no worse. It still hurt like heck though so we decided it would probably be a good idea to have it looked at. Robin would go to the clinic in the village and I would go for a day hike. Since I was sort of hoping to see Horseshoe Mesa as part of our aborted Red Canyon/Grandview loop hike, I decided that a day hike down the Grandview Trail to Horseshoe Mesa would be a good trade off. We had some breakfast, drove back up to the Canyon and I turned the car over to Robin at Grandview Point. It was something like 9 am and the plan was for her to meet me back at Grandview Point at 2 pm. Five hours should give me plenty of time to get down there, do some looking around, and come back up. It was a beautiful day with a bright blue sky, lots of puffy white clouds and still a little on the cool side. I headed down the trail at a pretty good clip and arrived on the south side of the mesa top in about 1 hours. I was amazed at some of the techniques that had been used in the construction of the Grandview Trail and I thought sections of it were quite literally a work of art, particularly the cobbled sections. This was definitely a constructed trail. I hunted around the mesa top for a while looking at things but also continued heading in a mostly northerly direction up along the western arm. After a while I came to the point where the Cave of the Domes trail drops off to the Tonto Platform below, but I also noticed a fainter trail heading further out along the western arm and decided to follow that to see where it would go. After about a half-mile or so I came out to the very tip of the western arm and had the most amazing panorama spread out before me. There was a nice big Utah juniper out there casting a good bit of shade and there was also a bench of sorts, which had been constructed out of a huge slab of sandstone. It was the perfect picnic spot and it was almost noon so I decided to have my lunch out there. After eating lunch I felt very rested and I knew I had to start back for the rim. I headed south at breakneck speed towards the start of the Grandview Trail. I stopped to take a few photos near the start of the trail but then did not stop again until I was back on the rim. I was a little late and it was just after 2 pm when I reached the rim but there was no sign of Robin. I figured she would wait for me if I had not been there right at 2 so I assumed she had not shown up yet. I waited until 2:15 2:30 2:45 and finally around 3 pm figured something must be up and I started walking. She could not help but see me on the road and it gave me something to do. I was hoping that I would not have to walk all the way back to Grand Canyon Village. I finally met her on the road leading in to Grandview Point about halfway out to the East Rim Drive. I got in the car and she said that she was sorry but that the clinic had been all backed up with other cases and since hers was not life-threatening she had to wait. They had x-rayed her ankle and told her that it was broken. The only reason why she was still able to walk on it was because the break had been clean and the bones had not moved out of place at all. They had put an air cast on it and said that it should be fine in a couple of months.
|
| ||||||||||
|
|
|---|
|
|---|
