I am a planner. I always have been. Vacations, work projects, dinner on a Tuesday. If there is a way to be ready for something, I will find it and do it twice. Planning makes me feel like I have a deal with the universe: if I do my part, things should go the way I hoped.
So, when I decided to hike the Grand Canyon rim to rim, I did what I always do.
Rim to rim is 35 kilometres from one side of the Grand Canyon to the other. It drops over a 1,700 metres into the canyon and climbs back out the other side. Some people don’t finish. I was going to finish.
I did four months of training: stair climber, long weekend hikes, running, heat training (which is exactly as fun as it sounds: cardio followed immediately by sitting in a sauna so your body learns to work in extreme heat). I dialled in my nutrition, my hydration, my gear. I consumed every piece of content I could get my hands on about hiking rim to rim – podcasts, books, online forums, websites, all of it.
Standing at the trailhead with my hiking buddy Beth, I remember thinking, “I’m so ready for this.”
Then, about five kilometres in, I sprained my ankle. Badly. The kind where you hear it before you feel it. And in the few seconds between hearing it and the pain arriving, I already knew. This is over. How embarrassing!
I want to say I handled it gracefully. I didn’t. I sat down on a rock, and I cried. I cried because it hurt. I cried because I was angry. I cried because four months of early mornings and sore legs and telling everyone about this hike had all just ended on a single wrong step. I had done everything I was supposed to do… and it didn’t matter.
That is a particular kind of grief, I think. The kind that comes when effort and outcome don’t match. When the story you had been telling yourself about what was going to happen collapses.
I had a choice. Keep going, thirty more kilometres with a wrecked ankle, descending deeper into the canyon where turning back would only get harder. Or climb the five kilometres I had just come down, alone, while my hiking buddy continued without me.
I turned around.
Every step in the wrong direction felt like proof that I had failed. Other hikers were passing me on their way down, fresh and excited, at the beginning of the thing I was abandoning. I kept my head down. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
I kept thinking about the moment right before the sprain. One second I was fine. One second I was on pace. And then I wasn’t. I wanted to go back to that second and redo it. Step slightly to the left. Pay more attention. I did that the whole way up.
On the shuttle bus to the other rim, I ended up sitting next to a woman who turned out to be an emergency room physician. She had just finished her own rim to rim going the opposite direction. She noticed my ankle, asked if she could take a look, and taped it up properly. Then she told me exactly how to take care of it over the next few days. I still think about her kindness.
Two days later, my ankle was still swollen but I could walk on it. Angels Landing in Zion was already on our itinerary. Before the sprain, it had felt like a bonus, a fun side hike next to the main event. Now it felt like the one thing I had left.
It is a completely different kind of hike. Shorter. Steeper. There are chains bolted into the rock because the drop-offs on either side are that exposed. My ankle ached the whole way up. But I made it. And standing at the top, looking out over Zion canyon, I felt something I hadn’t felt since the trailhead at the Grand Canyon.
I felt proud of myself. Not because I had pushed through pain. Because I had made the harder choice two days earlier. If I had kept going on that busted ankle, I wouldn’t have been standing here at all.
A few days after that, I did a rock climbing and rappelling tour, another thing I would have missed if I hadn’t turned around.
I have always believed that if you prepare hard enough, you earn the outcome. That planning is a form of control. And for most of my life, that belief has worked well enough to keep me holding on to it.
The Grand Canyon took that from me, not so gently. The plan was never the point. It was just the thing that got me to the trailhead. What happened after that was up to something bigger than my preparation.
I haven’t done rim to rim yet. I want to go back. And when I do, I will train just as hard and prepare just as much. But I hope I will also remember that rock, the climb back up, the woman on the bus, and the trip I didn’t plan that turned out to be the one I needed.
I am still learning to be okay with that.
Amy Estill
