Day four of our trip down the Grand Canyon was a layover day. It’s exactly what you expect, you do all of the little things that you don’t have time to do during the hubbub of rafting.
Laundry, shower, and sit in the sun. Showering is much less fun that you would regularly imagine. The water is consistently between 50-52 degrees. You can bring a solar shower and set it in the sun to warm it up, but who has time for that?!
Instead I bathed in the Colorado River and then laid out in the sun to dry off. Half of our group went for a hike up Buck Canyon while the sun was still out. The other half of us wanted to enjoy the sun and waited until the sun departed the beach before we started the same hike.
There aren’t necessarily trails on most of these hikes you just go up the canyon until you can’t go any further. This hike ended when we came to a pour over. A pour over is a place where the water pours off into a pool, the pour over was dry but it was about 20-25 feet up a sheer wall that we couldn’t climb, so we hung out briefly and then headed back to camp.
These little side canyons seem quite harmless, but if there is a big rain storm they can be deathly dangerous. If a large amount of water comes roaring through the canyon it is trapped by the walls and after it has collected dirt, rocks and debris the slurry of near concrete like fluid will knock you down and likely kill you. It was not raining on this day, so we did not have to take any extraordinary precautions, but any hike in the Grand Canyon is not at all akin to a walk in the park.
My hair was a complete and utter disaster, so I had Eva braid my hair. It was nice to have it compact against my head, but I did look incredibly silly.
