Section 4: Back Down to Manzanita

We left the North Kaibab trailhead at about 11:15am. It’s tough to leave the trailhead as it’s such an energetic and lively place, but we had a job to do. At this point, I was feeling great and ready to charge back to the start. The opportunity to reset my body temperature by soaking all my gear in deliciously cold water and refuel in a big way gave me the boost that I needed to get rolling. The excitement of the effort to come was refreshed, almost feeling like we did that morning at the Bright Angel trailhead.

While at the trailhead we were chatting with a guy named Brian whose friends were much more serious runners than he was and left him a while ago while heading up the North rim. He was by himself now doing R3 and so we invited him to join us on the way back. He was a super nice guy and stuck with us for a couple miles before we too lost him. He was enjoying his his leisurely pace it seemed.

The way back down the trail was still steep and dusty, but much faster than the way up. We were “cruising” at about 16-17 min / mile pace down to Manzanita. It’s still a pretty steep trail and a lot of hikers coming up made it tough to go too fast, but we were jogging and making good time, everyone feeling pretty good.

As I mentioned on the way up, this part of the trail is epic. There are sheer drops hundreds of feet high where you’re running along an in-carved rock wall. It’s so beautiful and at the same time a bit terrifying. There are some very cool bridges along this part of the canyon as well, which you cross and have some spectacular views back down into the canyon, though I hate to say I didn’t really take many photos because our goal was not sightseeing, but to get back to the other side, which requires a lot of focus.

That said, going down this part of the trail was when I really enjoyed it. I was still having a bit of pain in my hip, but that wasn’t such an issue when we could job and only seemed to be present when we would walk. Regardless, this section in my memory was a bit more of a daze than others. I suppose probably because I was realizing just how hot it was getting, moving toward the 100° mark as we moved toward the bottom of the canyon. I also think that a renewed focus had set in with the realization that we’re pot committed now and it’s all about getting through the next 25 miles.

One vivid memory I do have is that all along the way down, we would run up on some people hiking and have to pause and walk and wait until there was a wide enough part of the trail that we could safely run by since more often than not, we were teetering on the edge of a ledge that we didn’t want to misstep from. That was pretty exhilarating.

It took us a little under two hours to get back down to Manzanita where we spent about 10 minutes amongst a throng of people going both directions trying to refill bottles and take in some calories while staying out of the sun. This is where I first broke out my jelly beans and peach rings. The jelly beans were ok, but the peach rings were something out of this world. In hindsight, I would bring way more of those.

A lot of times people talk about getting “sweeted out” with too much of the sweet energy foods and I’ll agree for many things, like the waffles, which I started to dread, but the peach rings were perfect. I highly recommend.

The other thing I tried to eat here was my peanut butter and honey sandwich. It turns out that honey does nothing to add moisture to the sandwich and so you end up with something that turns into a gummy peanut butter sandwich that needed a lot of water to help it go down. It did, however, give me some much needed calories for the next section we were about to embark on.

We wrapped up as quickly as we could here at Manzanita, knowing we will refill at Cottonwood anyway, and set out to get ourselves to Phantom Ranch for something special.