[Note: this post wasn’t put together until February 2022 and was not based on notes; it was taken out of memory.]
For the past two months, I’ve been driving my mother-in-law Jutta Engelhardt mad as we went hiking, visited the gym, got her on a bike, had her volunteering at Tonopah Rob’s farm with me, and generally kept her ridiculously busy. Over that time, I never let on why I was pushing her nearly every day to keep moving, but that reason is being shared with her right now. We are hiking her into the Grand Canyon.
In all her visits to the canyon, of which there are many, we never attempted to hike her into this place as we never felt her health and stamina were up to the task.
So here she is at 73 years old, more than ten years since that first visit back in 1997, and I’m confident she’ll do just fine.
Her enthusiasm is great, and she’s excited by the prospect of going on such a hike, though she’s also a bit nervous about “How we’ll get this old lady out of the canyon.”
My memory is fuzzy, but I don’t believe I’d be exaggerating if I claimed that Jutta told us 100 times this day how appreciative she was for not only bringing her here but believing she’d be able to do such an extraordinary thing.
Down we went, ensuring she remained sure-footed and relying on the walking sticks. If she fell down along the way, it wouldn’t have been the first time while visiting us in America, but all the training in the gym we’d done in those previous 60 days was to avoid such a potentially scary situation.
While the ladies made their way down to where these mules were tied up, I raced down to snap a few photos.
And when I rejoined Caroline and Jutta I was able to grab a couple more images of the mules on their way back to the rim after their break.
As for us…
…we’ve reached the halfway point at Cedar Ridge. Now that the easy stuff is out of the way, time to get serious.
But not before admiring the canyon for another moment as we had lunch, visited the toilet hut, and smiled at each other a lot.
Now, Jutta’s endurance is about to be seriously challenged.
Notice that she’s still smiling.
We stopped frequently with Jutta, apologizing that she was slowing us down. Of course, we reassured her that we were here JUST for her, and this was all about her accomplishing a hike in the Grand Canyon in her 70s. This was worth every second we were spending with her here.
We did have a bit of a scare towards the end of the hike as snow flurries were dusting the area, and it felt like we were losing light, but we just kept on going forward.
After 8 hours out here hiking the 2.8-mile roundtrip trail to Cedar Ridge, we were done, and the smile should tell you everything.
We celebrated this grand accomplishment in the Grand Canyon with our favorite hot chocolate on earth at El Tovar. Here’s to winning!
We’re driving home tonight as this milestone in Jutta’s life has been achieved, and there is nothing left to do here except start bragging.
This is epic Grand Canyon hiker Laurent “Maverick” Gaudreau. We met him on the bus out to the South Kaibab Trailhead. We learned of his incredible feat of hiking rim-to-rim 100 times just the year before during his 80th year. Not a year after I took this photo, he would take his wife’s and his life.
