Epic Grand Canyon Hike: Frozen Shoes and Low on Food (Part 2) | National Geographic

After 160 miles of hiking without a trail, we'd hoped our next sections would get easier. They didn't. With 500 plus miles to go, we have to keep moving downstream. For the next two months, we do just that, hiking 12 hours a day, often hunting water and locating our food caches strategically stashed in advance, 50 to 100 miles apart.

At one spring, we stop and gaze upon its babbling current, thirsty but reluctant to drink. Horn Creek sits below the defunct orphan uranium mine, which operated above us on the rim until 1969. Today, the waters in Horn Creek are still tested to be poisonous to drink. It serves as a reminder of how activity on the rim affects the world below.

Another 150 miles west, hiking on the Tanto bench, we exit briefly to visit Park officials at the south rim to get their perspective on the state of the canyon. "We work really hard in every way we can to preserve and protect the integrity of this place, and these outside external threats can only diminish that. This is the most protected place in the world in terms of the body of laws that have gone on to protect this place, and yet what do you think I spend most of my time doing? It's protecting this place. My job is to continually raise hell about what's going on and to make sure that some of these major developments don't occur, like a tram to the bottom of Grand Canyon, the town of Tusion, and a mega-resort development. Uranium is another one of those threats. It's been here since day one. It continues to be. We have to work with a number of groups to make sure that the withdrawal of uranium mining lands around the park stay in place forever."

By late January, the heat we feared in the fall is long forgotten. We recruit through hiker Rich Rudo, our pal Kelly McGrath, and Amy Martin, a former park ranger, to help shoulder the heavy loads of food and gear for the winter challenge. It's a good thing we do; an arctic front quickly blows through, our bones making us shiver through long crisp nights. "I love the sun in the morning. Oh man, what it's been so cold. Then came the snow gust, the 45 mph. We've got a likelihood of snow tonight, snow tomorrow, so we're going to get hammered pretty good. Little stormy. We're running low on food, and if we don't keep walking, we're not going to get to our food cache in time. So my big question is, when do I start to panic?"

"Right now, I don't know how to get my feet into the bricks of ice. The only way in this attempt to deal with this is a little bit of warm water. We're putting spikes on our feet. Some of these bays are really steep, and if you break loose, you can't stop yourself. You're going over into the abyss."

"Hard to imagine that that's potentially 3,000 feet down. Yeah, this is Allies Bay, and was named for those two incredible, you know, hollowed out ice sockets up there that look like a big owl. In 2012, a friend of ours, Elana, was walking with Matias through here, and we don't know exactly how, but Elana slipped into the couloir and then just did a run-out for, you know, 40 or 50 feet, and then over the edge. She fell 400 feet. So this place is special to us for remembering her, and a super spot for us to camp. She would be thrilled."

We've made it around the Great Thumb, past Allies, one of the sketchier days of the trip. It's day nine on this leg. We brought eight days of food but definitely got ten and a night in both ankles. Just a few minutes ago, my patella was right here, and I had to do a little bit of this to get it back into its place. "We are super remote, so there really aren't many options. It's a little thin right here. I'm good. I'm good."

"You can't hike out here without a contingency plan. Nothing really ever goes exactly according to plan. We're a perfect example of that."

After soldiering through one of the most remote sections of the canyon, we drop off the ocratine Esplanade back to the Red Wall layer where wild burros reside and then descend into the magic of Olo Canyon. Olo Canyon's incredibly beautiful, and then when the light changes, the reflections in the potholes just make you think that you're, you know, seeing some kind of divine intervention as you're going through these places. It's just my favorite place in Grand Canyon.

I could have spent days studying the secrets of this labyrinth, but our stomachs won't allow it. "If we don't keep moving, we won't eat."

"Got it. What'd you get? We have our Olo C; we're going to eat."

"Again, these are my favorite crackers. Open. Oh my God, Kelly, give me that. Oh, this is... oh, yummy! These are loaded fake potato! Shut the front door, like Chipotle!"

By early February, we emerged from our coldest, hardest leg at Havasu Creek. Once again, a storm of controversy and debate on the rim above us could play a hand in the future of the natural cathedrals and springs we walked through. Mining in and around the park has been a charged subject for decades. Recently, it has ignited again with the reopening of the Canyon Mine on the south rim, just outside the park boundary.

"The Havasupai Native American tribe are some of the longest inhabitants of Grand Canyon, and they are concerned that a mining accident might change their world. This is the actual site of the Canyon Mine. My reservation is about 20 miles from here, and we feel that this mine behind me is going to contaminate our groundwater source. When it floods here, it goes down to the Supai village where 800 members of my tribe live down there. When this contamination does reach our home, there'll be no more Havasupai."

"The mining that we do out here is heavily regulated. There are major controls for water protection, both ground and surface water protection, which basically means that no water can enter or exit the site except through precipitation, and even precipitation that falls on this site is diverted to a evaporation pond and it's evaporated. Spirit is very powerful; you see the rains that have come into the East where there's flooding. If that overflows and it goes down the ravine, it goes straight into our home and will leach into the ground, and it will begin to affect our people's water."

"I'll tell from a water standpoint, there are a variety of reasons why we're not concerned. We're well above any sort of a regional aquifer. There are no known connections from even the bottom of these mines to the regional aquifers. Groundwater is kind of a black box in science; water infiltrates into the Earth and flows in fractures and fault lines and comes out someplace. But really, the path of water through the ground is quite mysterious, and therefore the trustworthiness of anybody's claim about any of the flow directions, the timing of the flow path, the duration of the flow path for that groundwater needs to be reviewed. Everybody in the country wants all of the positive things that energy gives you: your cell phone, your computer, your TV, your heat, your lights; everything that we use runs off of power. We didn't put the uranium here. This is the best place in the United States where uranium occurs, but again with our small scale mining that we're doing here, I just don't think that there's any reason to have any concern for the Grand Canyon."

"Everybody's talking about money. Everybody wants to make money. Our main concern is our lives. We're talking about human lives here."

Once again, Kevin and I leave a brewing debate on the surface of the canyon to tackle our own challenges. We have another 200 miles to go through Western Grand Canyon, which some call the Godscape.