Day 170, Monday, November 21

Last night dipped down to about 20 degrees. That wouldn’t be much of a problem except for the fact that both my tent and sleeping bag are designed for warmer weather. My tent has a LOT of mesh panels so the wind whips under the rain fly and largely unhindered through the tent. Again that wouldn’t be a problem except that my sleeping bag is a 40 degree bag. I wore two layers of pants and three layers of shirts in my bag last night. On top of that I had to draw the opening of my bag down to the extent that just the tip of my nose stuck out.
Yesterday, before setting up camp, I stopped by one of the park ranger offices of the park and inquired about the hike I wanted to take today. Per Bob’s suggestion, I’ll be hiking the Bright Angel trail from the South rim of the canyon down to the Colorado River then over to Phantom Ranch and back up today. It’s a 20 mile hike with a little more than 4000 feet of elevation change from the rim to the river.
Got up at 5:30 this morning so I could get an early start on today’s hike. I was on the trail by 6:15, before sunrise. The canyon was in full Fall color. The trees and grasses were all splendidly yellow and red. When I got to Phantom Ranch, I went to set my camera up on my tripod and realized that, in prepping my equipment at 5:45, I forgot to pack the mount for my camera. What a disappointment (no, those wouldn’t *quite* have been my words at the time I discovered my mistake). I had to balance my camera up on top of the tripod in order to take the picture. Phantom Ranch was kind of disappointing. It was a bit like a concession stand at an amusement park. On my way back up to the rim, I was really hustling in order to make it out of the canyon in time to take a shower (guest services at Mather Campground where I was staying closed at 6:00 and I wanted to give myself plenty of time.) I actually did the hike out much faster than I’d intended to. My times were.4 hours down, 1 hour at bottom, 4 hours up. VERY tiring, but very satisfying.