Grand Canyon -- April 28 to May 1, 2011

Hikers

Dave O'Brien
Jani Radebaugh
Colin Dundas

Background

This was the seventh Grand Canyon hike I've done. Here's links to pages for my first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth hikes there. Jani has been along on all but one of these hikes, and Colin was along on the 2008 and 2010 hikes. Both are pretty adventurous when it comes to hiking, so when I brought up the idea of doing the Nankoweap Trail (one of the hardest in the Canyon) along with some off-trail exploring, they couldn't refuse!

Hike Description

This hike was a ~35-mile, 4-day trek through the Grand Canyon, taking the Nankoweap Trail from the North Rim down to Nankoweap Canyon (one of the side canyons), then hiking over a ridge to Kwagunt Canyon (another side canyon), along the Colorado River, and back to Nankoweap Canyon, then back out via the Nankoweap Trail. The Nankoweap Trail is widely regarded as one of the hardest rim-to-river trails in the Canyon, and is classified as a "primitive" trail by the Park Service. The rest of the route had some faint trails in places, but required some route-finding and obstacle-avoiding at other times. We ran into a few river rafting parties along the Colorado, and a few other groups camping in Nankoweap Creek, but otherwise it was mostly just us for the whole 4 days there. You can access the trail starting from the Saddle Mountain Trailhead in the main North Rim area, but given the high elevation there it's usually closed due to snow until mid-May. We came in via a lower-elevation route along FS Road 8910 from Hwy 89A, which takes you to another trailhead for the Saddle Mountain Trail. That goes about 3.5 miles to the rim of the Canyon, where the Nankoweap Trail officially starts.

This section of the Canyon is interesting for several reasons. For one, the pre-Cambrian rocks of the Grand Canyon Supergroup are exposed. In other areas of the Canyon, these and other rocks were eroded away, leaving a roughly one billion year gap in the geologic record (the Great Unconformity), but in the eastern part of the Canyon, faulting and tilting protected part of the Supergroup from being fully eroded away. One set of rocks, the Chuar group, is only found in this area, and contains fossil stromatolites, which are probably about 700-800 million years old. One of the main faults on the Colorado Plateau, the Butte Fault, passes through this area. About 1 billion years ago, as the supercontinent Rhodinia was being pulled apart, it dropped the central part of what is now the Grand Canyon area by nearly 10,000 feet! It was later reactivated during the compression that led to the building of many of the western mountain ranges within the last ~100 million years, and this led to a folding of overlying sedimentary layers, creating the East Kaibab Monocline and uplifting the central part of the Grand Canyon. The region where we were hiking was ground-zero for much of this faulting and deformation, so there was a lot of neat geology to see.

The weather was pretty good most of the time. It wasn't too hot, and there wasn't any precipitation, although it was fairly windy at points, and on the first night it got windy enough that none of us slept all that well. We hiked part of the way out on the third day and camped at close to 7000' elevation that night, which meant it got pretty cold. The nighttime low was 26F, but fortunately the wind didn't pick up that night, and we brought warm clothes!

The Park Service has more info about the Nankoweap Trail as a PDF document that you can download. The book Hiking the Grand Canyon's Geology also has a lot of good information about the area. There's scattered information on the web about getting over to Kwagunt Canyon from Nankoweap and returning along the river route, like this , this , and this . I believe that a book called Day Hikes From the River by Tom Martin might have some more detailed info, although I didn't get a chance to read it before the hike.

Here's an approximate map of the route, courtesy of Google Maps. Campsites are marked with black dots. The brown trail is the Saddle Mountain Trail, red is the Nankoweap Trail, and blue is the off-trail route we took over to Kwagunt Canyon and back along the Colorado River (as best as I can infer).

Pictures

Day 1 - Nankoweap Trail to Nankoweap Canyon
Day 2 - Hike to Kwagunt Canyon and Along the River
Day 3 - Nankoweap Trail to Marion Point
Day 4 - Marion Point to the Trailhead

Other People's Pictures

Jani's

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Last modified May 4, 2011