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| Hiking | 7.30 Miles |
1,682 AEG |
| | Hiking | 7.30 Miles | 5 Hrs | | 1.46 mph |
| 1,682 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | Clear Creek Trail provided me a gorgeous, dare say spectacular, morning hike.
Some background. My wife and I stayed two nights, three days at Phantom Ranch down in the Grand Canyon. On the middle day, my wife walked and relaxed amidst the scenery, and I took some modest hikes.
As temperatures were expected to exceed 100 degrees by afternoon, I set out early – a bit after our 5 am breakfast sitting – to travel in the cooler morning air. (Note, camera for photoset had East Coast time, 3 hours ahead.) I aimed first to cover a short section of North Kaibab, to the second bridge from Phantom Ranch, then to double back and catch Clear Creek, not far in, just until it rose onto the plateau in front of Sumner Point on Zoraster Temple. All in, maybe a total of 7 plus miles round trip, including both the North Kaibab and Clear Creek legs.
The hike did not disappoint – I was graced with amazing views.
First, North Kaibab. North Kaibab runs essentially flat on the section to the second bridge, and was covered in shade in the early morning. The going was easy, and the lower canyon walls towered up around me, as I took in the gnarled shapes, bulges and incursions created by the intense pressures that formed the ancient rock of those walls.
And for me, the lower rock walls exuded a powerful vertical thrust, as what I presume actually happened a couple billion years ago. Collisions of land masses flattened out rocks not horizontally, but vertically, and hot magma rose upward through any cracks.
In contrast to North Kaibab, Clear Creek does not run horizontally, at least at the start. The first mile or so involves a vertical gain, modest, of about 1200 feet. The trail runs somewhat rugged in places, but the grade remains moderate and consistent, and the switchbacks and climb readily navigated. After the climb at the start, the trail levels out, gaining just several hundred feet in elevation to my end point below Sumner Point.
Clear Creek offered long, deep vistas. As I walked along, great lengths of the lower canyon walls with their powerful vertical lines and interlaced colors stretched out in multiple directions. Soft green expanses of low vegetation on talus slopes offset and counterbalanced the power of the walls. The Colorado river poked into view at spots. The horizontal strata of the lower sedimentary layers of the canyon laid stacked atop the lower walls, with their horizontal lines creating a sharp contrast to the vertical thrusts of the lower walls. And in the far distance, above, the bands of rock under the south rim prodded through visible amidst the distant haze.
Then the in-your-face close-ups. The level section of Clear Creek I traversed ran along the boundary between the hardened lower walls and the first set of horizontal sedimentary layers. The solidified magma and metamorphosed rock of the lower walls, warped and twisted though they were, reached up as if columns of a roman building, to hold up the great horizontal lengths of red and orange sedimentary sandstone. And while the sedimentary sandstone originated far into the past, many hundreds of millions of years ago, the magma and rock supporting them overshadowed this sandstone in age, having originated over a billion years ago. The boundary between the two represented eons and eons of ancient rock gone.
Finally, I met a complete change of scene once up on the plateau. On the plateau, gone were the vertical and horizontal strata that had for the last stretches stood at essentially arms length away and towered dozens and hundreds of feet above. Now I stood on gently undulating ground, not unlike that on the trail to Plateau point, amidst low cactus and scrub. Visible now, though, its view no longer blocked by the walls, rising a thousand feet above, rose the front face of Sumner Point, itself despite its size just the forward wall of one arm of the gigantic Zoraster Temple.
I turned around here, but Clear Creek ran for many more miles, to reach, well, Clear Creek proper, and along the way to the creek, provide stunning views further up the Colorado and further around Zoraster Temple.
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