The North Rim Of The Grand Canyon The Niche For The Less Aggressive Hiker Is Filled With Solitude And Beauty

In the early 1980s, I came to a decision that so vastly improved my quality of life, I only regret that I didn’t think of it 20 years sooner.

Struggling up out of the Grand Canyon on the Thunder River trail, from the mouth of Tapeats Creek where it empties into the Colorado River to Monument Point on the North Rim, and with the temperature about 104, and with the sole of my left boot starting to disengage from its vamp and quarter, I realized how bitterly I loathed walking - particularly up a 40 percent grade - with a pack on my back. “This is it,” I told the raven peering down at me from a ledge across the ravine. “Nevermore.”

Stories of 75-year-old grandmothers cruising the Bright Angel Trail notwithstanding, I have stuck to my guns. Day hikes only. Short ones. Carry nothing but smoked trout, Carr’s Water Crackers, havarti, Spanish olives, a bottle of Leflaive Montrachet ‘77 and a truffle. Forget lugging all those plastic bottles of water around. Nobody ever died with an unfinished Montrachet in their pack. Leave late, return early, schedule time for a recuperative nap.

So it happens that in mid-October of 1994, my wife, Lynn, and I are on our way from Lee’s Ferry to Pipe Springs when we decide to detour (she demands we detour) to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for a trot out to Widforss Point - which is on my short list of acceptable trots, and which many people, including me, regard as the most enchanting of North Rim walks.

It is short and easy (10 miles round trip), relatively level, restricted to foot travel. And as it crosses the entire range of Kaibab Forest environments on its way to an overlook into the great maw of the Awful Gorge, it offers the best of both rim and plateau.

Unless one is fond of traffic jams, vast herds of tourists, the blatting discord of helicopter rotors and aircraft engines, and a pervasive smudge of diesel fumes polluting the atmosphere from a continuous convoy of tour buses, the North Rim is the location of choice.

To be sure, vistas from park headquarters on the South Rim are grand, but they are variations on a theme - abrupt depth swallowed by panoramic infinitude (seen in consort with the park’s 5 million annual visitors).

The North Rim, on the other hand, offers a larger diversity of terrain, a greater opportunity for solitude, a multiplicity of flora and fauna, as well as wondrous vistas. Less precipitous in its plunge to the Colorado River, there is a middle ground to the North Rim views, more to frame the picture by.

And while visitation to this section of the park is delightful during the spring and summer when everything is budding and buzzing and blooming, I prefer it in the fall when the aspens have turned and there is frost on the meadows in the early morning - emphasis here on “frost” and “early morning.” I like it to warm up during the day.

The fact that it snowed eight inches last night suggests to me bad timing, but it merely augments Lynn’s appetite for adventure.

Three miles short of Grand Canyon Lodge, a dirt road leaves the paved highway from Jacob Lake, curves around a wooded slope and crosses a grassy meadow full of bright red skyrockets and hairy gold asters to the Widforss trailhead marker - except that the grasses, skyrockets and asters have all disappeared under a blanket of white.

The path rises from the end of the meadow and traverses a gentle (I argue steep) slope of ponderosa, spruce and aspen before leveling off along the upper reaches of Transept Canyon.

The Transept is actually a side canyon feeding into Bright Angel Canyon - which, in turn, feeds into the main canyon of the Colorado - but like all these overgrown ravines, it is huge, deep and utterly inhospitable. Much better viewed, I suggest, from its eastern side, through the windows of the cozy dining room at Grand Canyon Lodge. Over tea and crumpets. No such luck.

For about three miles, the path follows the western contour of the Transept, periodically poking out to the edge for fantastic views to the south.

From a spur where my whining finally procures a rest stop, we can see across 11 miles of tributary canyons, amphitheaters, buttes, mesas, ledges and alcoves to the near vertical wall of the South Rim, somewhere around Moran Point. In the foreground lies the abyss, in the middle ground the creamy, Coconino caprock of Deva, Brahma and Zoroaster Temples.

Against the distant horizon, 70 miles beyond Angels Gate, Wotans Throne and Vishnu Temple, the lofty volcanic peaks of the San Francisco Mountains mark the southern boundary of the Colorado Plateau.

At some points along the North Rim the mixed ponderosa, white fir and Douglas fir forest extends well over the brink and down into the canyon for about four or five hundred feet - whereupon it gives way to scattered stands of pinyon, juniper, mountain mahogany, blackbrush and sage. Along the Widforss Trail the typical plateau species stop at the rim, and change rather abruptly, as one descends.

We switchback around several ravines that feed into The Transept and then angle away from the rim. Through the woods, the slender, bleached trunks of aspen are interspersed among the conifers, and their leaves, fluttering down from stark and bony branches, lie scattered on the snow like golden inlays in a slab of pure Makrana marble. The air is dry and brittle with the cold.

Coming up out of a shallow valley through venerable ponderosa over a hundred feet tall and probably twice as old, many of which have been scarred by lightning strikes, we scare up a herd of turkeys, the first sign of wildlife we’ve seen - other than squirrel tracks and a healthy-looking coyote trotting along the edge of the meadow at the trailhead.

We might have had better luck if we were making this trek back in 1905, and the federal government hadn’t yet established the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve, much of it on the Kaibab Plateau. The only game “preserved” was the ubiquitous and still-fawned-over mule deer, who, not being eaten by lions, wolves and coyotes, overpopulated and ate themselves (so to speak) out of house and home.

Although the wolves are gone, the mountain lion and bobcat have returned in relatively small numbers. But our chances of encountering any representatives of the cat family are slim to none. Coyote, fox, deer and wild turkeys, maybe, and perhaps the Kaibab squirrel, who stores up no food for winter and does not head for a burrow when the snow flies like more sensible red squirrels, chipmunks, woodrats, harvest mice and middle-aged gentlemen unencumbered by athletic wives.

The large, black-bodied Kaibab squirrel, with its white bushy tail, is found only in the ponderosa pine forests on the northern side of the Grand Canyon and nowhere else in the world although sightings are uncommon.

For about a mile-and-a-half, the trail goes up a long ravine and through a mature stand of russetbarked ponderosa before it terminates at Widforss Point. We stop to listen to the hammering of a hairy woodpecker and comment that he seems to be a little behind in getting his acorns laid up.

The trees are tall, widely spaced and virtually without understory, and we can tell just from the change in the quality of light that we are almost on the rim.

And then suddenly the forest ends. There is a narrow band of sloping desert vegetation - Utah agave, juniper, pinyon, Gambel oak, cliffrose, Apache plume and hedgehog cactus - a picnic spot and tiny camping area, and a rocky spine leading to a small overlook.

The huffing hiker either quits here and unpacks his lunch, or executes a 3,000-foot head-plant into Haunted Canyon.

Widforss Point lies a few thousand feet to the left, between an unnamed drainage on the east and the upper reaches of Haunted Canyon on the west. But however you define the trail’s end, it’s a precipitous drop to the bottom.

As I predicted, at about the time I am uncorking the Montrachet and delaminating the plastic wrap from the smoked trout, it begins to snow again, lightly. Lynn could not care less, so enraptured is she with the vista - the great western wall of Manu Temple immediately in front of us, Buddha Temple beyond and the endless cacophony of buttes, buttresses, points, pyramids, terraces and cathedrals soaring out of the “awesome cavity” that defies narration.

I could do better describing the wine and fish than the view. Clarence Dutton, the first geologist to study the Plateau, observed, “It is perhaps in some respects unfortunate that the stupendous pathway of the Colorado River through the Kaibabs was ever called a canyon, for the name identifies it with the baser conception.”

The simple noun gives no concept of proportion, ornamentation, design, color and atmosphere. “All of these attributes combine with infinite complexity to produce a whole which at first bewilders and at length overpowers.”

A sentiment to which I fully subscribe. The Montrachet, on the other hand, is almost as complex as the Grand Canyon - without surpassing comprehension.

ILLUSTRATION: 3 Color Photos

MEMO: For more information, write to Grand Canyon National Park, P.O. Box 129, Grand Canyon, Ariz. 86023; (602) 638-7888. For backcountry and overnight camping permits, write to Backcountry Reservations Office, P.O. Box 129, Grand Canyon, Ariz. 86023; (602) 638-7888. This story was excerpted from “Grand Canyon: The Great Abyss” by Page Stegner (HarperCollinsWest), with additional material from the author.