When Life Doesn't Hand You a 100% Guarantee

I almost didn’t hike Rim to Rim in the Grand Canyon. I don’t know about you, but sometimes, I find myself waiting for all the points to add up to 100% before taking a risk. Before pursuing a dream. Before saying “yes” and stepping off the edge.

Waiting for a 100% guarantee, almost caused me to miss out on an incredible experience.

The trouble began ten days before the hike when I developed a nasty sinus infection that made breathing difficult. Even with antibiotics I was unsure I would be healed enough to participate. Then three days before the hike, I woke up with stabbing pain in my left hip, a leftover gift from five years of an estrogen-blocking, anti-cancer drug. The pain was enough to wake me from a sound sleep.

The doubts began.

How will I handle the 23 miles in the canyon? The 4720’ drop in elevation? It's tough on the best days. Plus, the brutal 5500’ gain in elevation to hike to the North Rim? Will I have to cancel our plans to do the hike we prepared to do for 7 months?

I hate that as a cancer survivor, I still deal with scanxiety and lumps are never "just" anything. I hate that among other survivors we joke about cancer as "the gift that keeps on giving," trying to put a twisted spin on the reality it is too often the disease that keeps on taking.

Should I cancel my plans? 

I went back and forth in my mind a thousand times. Ultimately, I was afraid. I was afraid that the hike I had called "the closest thing to childbirth not involving a hospital" would be too much. Too much for my muscles. Too much for my joints. Too much pain. Too much.

I wanted to be at 100%, and instead, I found myself standing before my unpacked suitcase lacking in percentage points.

Was it too many points?

Still undecided, I picked up a book I had been reading: Dancing in Limbo: Making Sense of Life After Cancer. I thumbed through the pages, reading passages I had underlined. Near the end of the book, I had marked the words:

"You don't have time to waste. Whatever you want to do, do it. When you're alive and well and kicking ... Don't wait."

I felt something stir inside me - the willingness to take a risk. I took a pencil and wrote in the margin:

I am going to hike R2R. Not playing it safe.

******

“Are you packing your rain poncho?” I asked my husband the next night as we did our last check list for the hike we would be doing in the morning. Items were strewn all over the bed at the hotel located outside the entrance to the South Rim. Granola bars. Water bladder. Bagels. First aid kit.

“Rain poncho. Check,” my husband said.

“There’s only a 20% chance of rain tomorrow.”

“Yep.” He tucked his $1 raincoat, folded into the size of a postcard and with the thickness of a plastic grocery bag, into an accessible pocket in his backpack.

I thought back to an overnight hike in the Superstitions in the spring. 0% chance of rain. We had gotten soaked.

We had already weighed and considered every item back home in Chandler, but it is a ritual for me and my husband to always repeat the process at the hotel. We don’t want to carry one more ounce than necessary on the 23-mile hike up and down the canyon.

I might not be playing it safe, but I also tucked in my rain poncho.

*******

The next day, 12.5 miles into the hike, I was thankful for that decision.

We had been experiencing light sprinkles for about 3 miles, but not enough to warrant putting on the ponchos. Both of us hate hiking in plastic. The sweat caused from the non-breathable fabric can be worse than the moisture from a light rain.

But that changed at a fork in the trail near Ribbon Falls.

“High road or low road?” I asked.

My husband looked at the sky. Rain clouds. Dark and menacing.

“High road,” he said.

I knew without him telling me, that we didn’t want to be caught on low ground in a rainstorm. We were hiking the Grand Canyon, after all, a natural creation still being fashioned by the carving power of water.

Water that fashions stone should never be taken for granted.

The drizzle suddenly became a torrent. And with the torrent – hail. We both grappled with our light ponchos, the wind tossing the light plastic like a kite without a tether. I was getting soaked not only from above, but below. The red-dirt trail where we stood had become a small stream. Water was running over the top of my hiking shoes as it rushed to the low ground we had just abandoned.

“Look at that!” I pointed to an impromptu waterfall hundreds of feet above us. A stream of water, that hadn’t existed moments before, was falling, not in a clean wash of water, but in a muddy red-brown cascade.

“There’s another one,” my husband said, pointing further down the trail.

We continued to climb up in elevation. All water from hundreds of crevasses and countless side canyons seemed to be descending to our location. We clamored up the slippery trail. (We later heard of a hiker who got caught on the low trail by Ribbon Falls who had to wait 45 minutes before the trail was safe and then he hiked through knee-deep water. Another hiker in our group had a boulder crash down the canyon walls and land about five feet from where he was hiking.)

It was as if we had entered a four-dimensional world. Not just length and breadth and depth. But sound. And taste. And smell. All of our senses on high alert.

I remembered one 4th of July when friends had invited us to watch the fireworks from the top floor of the building where the husband worked. With temps over 110 degrees that day, we had jumped at the chance to be able to enjoy the show without fighting heat stroke. The fireworks had been spectacular. Viewed from the floor to ceiling office windows, the colors had been present in all their three-dimensional glory. But something was missing.

The sound. The feel of the explosion that pounds in the chest. The smell. The odor of gunpowder from the pyrotechnics.

That three-dimensional fireworks show, in all its beauty, had been sadly lacking. So it is, for me, with the Grand Canyon. The canyon may be one of the most photographed natural wonders in the word, but a two-dimensional picture does not prepare you for the wonder that can be found there. Even standing on a scenic overlook on the rim, where tourists exclaim over the length, breadth and depth, is nothing compared to the experience of hiking into the belly of the canyon.

Some things can only be experienced when you step off the rim into another dimension - where a 20% chance of rain results in a surround-sound thunderstorm that avalanches down the canyon.

An experience I almost missed.

Because I wanted life to hand me a 100% guarantee.

 *******

After the storm, water was still cascading down the canyon walls in impromptu waterfalls.

Piles of hail after the storm ended.

Waterfalls where the trail used to be. Kevin modeling our $1 rain ponchos!