Grand Canyon Sand Man

I know a guy. I know a guy who knows a guy who was in the villain’s entourage of the second “Die Hard” movie. This 6’6, 250-pound steel cable of a man trained hard for his role, notably by climbing a mountain in my hometown with a 100-pound sack. I’ve always wanted to be in the movies, and I figure I should start training for the “Die Hard” reboot they’ll unfortunately make in a few years. So, with stardom in mind, I threw 80-pounds of sandbags into my car and drove up to the Grand Canyon. 

A cloud was sitting on the Bright Angel Trailhead when I pulled up at 7 a.m. Placing the sandbags into a pack and sinching it onto my back, I hobbled through the mist and down the edge of the South Rim. After a quarter-mile of snow-packed trail I stepped through the bottom of the cloud and found the miles of rocky outcroppings and slot canyons that make this canyon so grand. 

Past the 1.5 Mile Resthouse the snow turned to mud, and my body cried for a break. Aiming for a dry patch, I took my pack off by squatting down and falling backwards onto the sandbags. After sucking down a few sandwiches, I made sure no one was watching before getting up via roly-poly maneuver: laying backwards onto my bag, strapping it across my chest, rolling onto my stomach, pushing up onto my hands and knees, then lunging onto my feet. 

I improved the roly-poly technique with each stop at the resthouses and gardens dotting the trail, where threatening signs tried to dissuade me from continuing further. My personal favorite was a sunburnt man throwing up on the ground with the warning “Hiking to the Colorado River and back in one day is not recommended due to long distance, extreme heat, and nearly 5,000-foot elevation change.” 

I chose to ignore this warning, even though I was consistently in the same hands-and-knees position as this vomiter (we even wore the same haircut and jeans). Those Hollywood lights had blinded me from seeing reality, and they shown on me as I roly-polied up and hiked on.

When I had made it nine miles down to Pipe Creek Beach I felt, surprisingly, okay. My body had figured out the best way to carry 80-pounds (it was to hunch forward like a chicken pecking the ground), and the downhill hadn’t demanded too much from my muscles. But the final mile to Phantom Ranch featured the first bit of uphill which caused my buttcheeks to seize in a malicious, involuntary twerk. 

I knew I couldn’t make it 10 miles up to the rim while throwing it back, so I unloaded at a beach on the Colorado River and prepared to say goodbye to my movie-star dreams. At the exact moment I began pulling sandbags out of my backpack, a flotilla of rafting Russians arrived at my beach. 

The Russians eyed me like the Cold War, and at the sight of my sandbags they murmured a chorus of “какого…” and “что он делает?” They fell silent when I began to gently untie sandbags and pour them into tidy rows on the beach. When finished, a dumbfounded Russian pointed directly at me (not at the rows of sand, but at my head) and shouted “what’s this?” With a smile I replied “beach restoration” before scurrying into the bush and back up to the South Rim.