Not all hikes go as planned, but that doesn’t make them bad hikes. Every hike confirms old lessons, teaches new ones and displays the wonders of nature.

• This December hike started before dawn, with the added feature of the Geminids meteor shower decorating the sky. In the early morning, there were no other hikers on the trail.

• The plan was to hike rim to river to rim on South Kaibab Trail at Grand Canyon. My microphone malfunctioned so the sound quality is compromised, but hopefully the incredible views will make up for the sound shortcomings. Here’s how it went:

• The Park Service usually sets a low bar for a day hike, they recommend that skeleton point is as far as you go in a day on South Kaibab Trail. In this case, they have a point, going the river view just past Skeleton Point gives you bulk of the beauty of South Kaibab Trail and leaves you with another half-a-day to do something else. For a first-time hiker on South Kaibab, I agree with the Park Service that Skeleton Point is a good destination.

• In my tips for older hiker’s video, I recommend that older hikers watch every step and stop when they talk. On the trail, a fellow a few years older than me raised his eyes off the trail to talk, and took a good tumble. He said he was okay, but my guess is that he would at minimum be as sore as heck a bit later in the day. Sometimes accommodations of the aging process like “watch every step,” and “Stop when you talk” seem overly cautious, that is until you see the results of not following such precautions.

• In the same video, I recommend being a friendly presence on the trail, and I relate how that friendliness saved me from relying on a water source that was not available. The same thing happened again on this hike.

• It is my habit to take a pre-hike hike to the trailhead to ask other hikers about trail conditions and water availability. I only spoke to two groups of hikers, one who only went to Skeleton Point, not the river, but said the hike was cold. A second couple of young hikers claimed to have made the river, but I should have known their claimed hiking time was inaccurately short, and not relied on their information. Sometimes people exaggerate their accomplishments, and that was what happened this time. I usually confirm information from at least three groups of people, something I learned traveling overseas in the pre-internet era, but this time I was in a hurry to complete a video about the best viewpoints at Grand Canyon before sunset, so I made an error that cost me meeting my goals on the hike. Lesson learned.

• Even if I had carried my water treatment equipment, I probably still would have turned around at the tip-off. My digestive system does not do too well with trail-treated water, and I probably would have followed another strategy, “when in doubt, take the conservative route.” and turned around anyway.

• But another lesson from the hike was to always carry a water treatment kit. What if I had hiked to the river, found no water and had no way to treat stream water? I could have ended up in trouble. So a new lesson for me is to always carry a water treatment method, even when treated water should be available.

• And, I accept the responsibility for not knowing about the water issue, but I sure wish the NPS had sent an employee out to post a sign at the trailhead. They knew about the water issue the day before I hiked, but no notice was posted on the internet and no notice was posted on the trailhead. I wonder about the young hikers who blew by me without this information and the dozens of others who went down the trail that day. Did any wind up in a bind because they had no notice treated water source was unavailable?

• The lack of treated water was the first hiking surprise, but the second surprise was the good trail conditions. Better trail grooming and my increased equipment and experience made the hike way easier than I remember it from almost a decade ago. I will be back on the same trail soon, completing the rim to river to rim hike.

• Plus, with the extra time I had that day, I was able to make the short hike out to Shoshone Point, a real treat of a viewpoint that I had been meaning to visit, but always ran short of time to see. The Surprise shortening of this hike lead me to a beautiful new vista.

• Initially, I thought the Kaibab Surprise was the lack of treated water that forced me to turn around, but additional surprises were the improvement in the condition of the trail, as well as my ability use experience and equipment to do better on the trail than I had almost a decade ago. Plus there was the treat of the spectacular weather and incomparable views, as well as the extra time to discover Shoshone Point. All in all, the hike was not what I had planned, but better than I expected. Thank you for watching, and Happy hiking to you!

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