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Welcome to the home of Grand Canyon hiking. The Grand Canyon Hiker Dude Show helps hikers plan, train for, and better understand hikes below the rim, from short day hikes to Rim-to-Rim, Rim-to-River, Phantom Ranch, Bright Angel Trail, South Kaibab Trail, North Kaibab Trail, backpacking trips, heat safety, water planning, shuttle logistics, and more.
Host Brian Speciale shares Grand Canyon stories, trail-tested advice, safety lessons, interviews, and community wisdom from first-timers, seasoned hikers, rangers, Canyon insiders, and everyday people who have learned powerful lessons below the rim.
Whether you are planning Rim-to-Rim, dreaming of Phantom Ranch, preparing for your first Grand Canyon hike, or looking for honest stories of triumph, tragedy, mistakes, and trail-won wisdom, this podcast will help you hike your best hike.
Listeners call the show “an invaluable resource,” “the perfect mix of inspiration, realistic caution, and tips for success,” and “a welcoming place and wealth of information.”
New episodes weekly. Join the conversation in the Hike Club Grand Canyon private Facebook group.
Oh, let it all out. It's okay. Most of us have made mistakes below the rim. And if you haven't, well, just give it another chance or two. This is Canyon Confessions, a bonus series from the Grand Canyon Hiker Dude Show.
Brian:My name is Brian Special, and these are the hard lessons from a place that does not care how good your plan sounded at the rim. These are your confessions submitted through our Height Club Grand Canyon Facebook group. I'll read them, sometimes summarize them a bit, and then try to add my own 2¢ because if there is anyone who's come out of the canyon wondering what the heck they were thinking, oh, yeah. It's this guy. And today, we are talking about fitness.
Brian:Not motivation, not toughness, not who you used to be, current fitness. Because one of the most dangerous things you can bring into the Grand Canyon is an old version of yourself. Hey. Maybe you used to be in great shape. Maybe you've done rim to rim before.
Brian:Maybe you hike all the time where you live. Maybe the mileage doesn't sound that bad on paper. Maybe you're looking at a trail and thinking, well, it's only a few miles down, or it's only a day hike, or I've done harder things than this. Guess what? The canyon does not care.
Brian:And I don't say that to be discouraging, I say it because I think it's one of the most useful things we can understand before we drop below the rim. The Grand Canyon does not grade you on your hiking resume necessarily. It grades you on the version of you that shows up that day. So before we get into it, quick reminder, this is not official park guidance. Always check current NPS conditions, water status, weather, closures, trail conditions, and your own medical situation before you drop below the rim.
Brian:Alright. Let's start with Steve Solomon, because I think Steve gave us the sentence that could probably carry this whole episode. Steve says he has learned two big canyon truths the hard way. Number one, the canyon has a way of dealing with those who don't respect it. And number two, it doesn't matter what you've done in the past, your current condition is all that matters, he writes.
Brian:That is it right there. That's the whole thing. Steve had completed a very successful rim to rim to rim in October 2020. He kept doing tough hikes after that. He had experience.
Brian:He had the memory of success. He knew what it was like to pass through the canyon in a big way. Then in August 2022, so almost a couple years later, almost two years later, after a bad case of COVID that derailed him for a few weeks, he was on the North Rim, and he was standing at Bright Angel Point, looking down at the route to the South Rim, and he had that thought, hey, man, you've passed through that twice in a day before when you did your R three. You can do it again. The thought that has gotten a lot of people into trouble in a lot of places.
Brian:Steve had packed his hiking stuff just in case, so he got ready to do North Kaibab, rim to river, and back. Now that is a huge hike, doing rim to river on North Kaibab. Talking about 28 miles round trip if you go all the way to the river with almost 12,000 feet of elevation change. That is a big one, a much more significant hike than if you do rim to river from the South Rim. At first, it sounds like it was going well for Steve.
Brian:He made good time to the river, went to the middle of the Black Bridge, turned back, refueled at Phantom Ranch, and even had cloud cover through the box and the frying pan. Conditions were about as good as you could hope for, except his body was not in a good way that day. Near Ribbon Falls, he says he started cramping, then it was not just one cramp, it was major muscle groups and both legs seizing up within seconds. He ended up on his back yelling in pain all alone out there on the trail. He eventually made it past Roaring Springs, then decided he had to backtrack.
Brian:So he went back down to Manzanita, and ended up spending part of the night at Manzanita on top of one of the picnic tables. Then part of the night as well on a restroom floor. Imagine being on the floor of the pit toilets, if that sounds good to you. He said he had to get in there to try to get a little sleep. After hydrating and a few hours of rest, he pushed himself out the next morning.
Brian:Listen to this. About twenty six hours after he started. Man, Steve, I cannot imagine the agony that you were going through. On a much happier note, he says he prepared incredibly well and knocked out the same hike in eleven hours in June 2024. So he came back and did it again.
Brian:So this is not a story about someone who can't do it. It's a story about timing, and a story about how your body's gonna react, or the condition you're gonna be in on a particular day. It's a story about the difference between what you are capable of in the right condition, and what you're capable of today, and that is such an important distinction. Because a dangerous thought is not always, I don't need to prepare. Sometimes a dangerous thought is, Hey, I've done something like this before, so I can do it again.
Brian:It'll all be the same as it was the last time, right? Well, maybe. Maybe you can, but can today's version of you actually do it? The version that got sick, let's say, two weeks ago. The version that's been working sixty hours a week.
Brian:The version that has not been sleeping well. The version that trained hard last year, but maybe not as hard this year. Hey, the Canyon's gonna find out, and if there's one thing to carry from Steve's confession, it is that line. It doesn't matter what you've done in the past. Your current condition is the only one that matters.
Brian:That is not just canyon wisdom, that is life wisdom, really. So Steve, what a story. I'm glad you shared that with us, and it sounds like we just went through three different versions of Steve. What the next one will be, who knows? And I bet that's what Steve is thinking as well.
Brian:Alright. Along those same lines, Lisa Marie shared a mistake that I actually think turned into a really good decision. Lisa said she had the busiest year of her life. She trained as much as she could fit in, but she was training at sea level in a flat state. Then she got sick, she says, two days before flying out, and still thought maybe she could manage a hike to and from Phantom Ranch.
Brian:Then she did a hike to Mile And A Half Rest House the day before, and that really humbled her. She said those trails at 7,000 feet elevation are not to be taken lightly, especially for someone coming from sea level with what she called sea level lungs. So instead of forcing that original plan to go all the way to Phantom, she hiked down to Ua, down South Kaibab with her friends, sent them on their way as planned, and then hiked back out herself, and decided to stay on the rim rather than pushing all the way down to Phantom. Now that is not failure. That is good, sound canyon judgment.
Brian:I really wanna emphasize that because I think sometimes we treat the changed plan as the disappointing version of the story. But in the Grand Canyon, sometimes changing plans like that is a success story. Lisa had new information. Her body was telling her things. The elevation was telling her things.
Brian:The test hike told her what she really needed to know, and she listened before she got down too deep and realized that it was going to be a much bigger problem. That's the version of this where pride takes over. The plane ticket's paid for, the friends are there, the dream is right there in front of you. Maybe you've talked about this hike for months, maybe you've imagined Phantom Ranch, you've dreamed about it, you've imagined getting to the river, maybe you've imagined walking back out and telling everyone you did it, posting it on Instagram, and that can create momentum, but momentum is not safety. So Lisa's decision to scale back may not have ended in the hike and the experience that she wanted, but it was the decision that left her experience in the canyon not turn into something that could have turned really bad.
Brian:It didn't turn into a rescue situation. So I love that, because that should this show is not here to tell you only about the successful hikes, and that the successful hike is only the big hike. The successful hike is the one that matches the reality of that day, your reality on that day. Okay. Next up, Pat Garner, who I just met recently.
Brian:She moved up to our area here in the Cave Creek, North Phoenix area of of Arizona, and I met her and hiked Black Mountain with her not too long ago, so I know all about Pat, and this one is such a classic Canyon lesson. Pat says she was not terribly prepared when she headed down Bright Angel with Plateau Point as her goal, back when Plateau Point was still accessible. It was closed for almost three years, just opened again recently. She felt great going down Bright Angel and thought, hey, this is no big deal. Her husband, though, suggested turning around at Mile And A Half Rest House, and Pat said basically, absolutely not.
Brian:So they kept going, and eventually turned around at 3 Mile Rest House. So they were gonna be short of their goal. If you're going down to Plateau Point and back, you have to get down to Havasupai Gardens, is four And a half miles down the trail, then it's another two miles out to Plateau Point and two miles back. So she said she had water, but her fueling was not good. She mentioned a keto bread sandwich and not much in the way of carbs, and the climb out after she wasn't feeling so hot got ugly.
Brian:She said she could not catch her breath and had to stop every 10 steps for at least a minute. It took five hours for them to get out from the three mile rest house, and get back to the South Rim. And I love this detail. She said she remembers turning around, looking up, and basically saying, oh, no, with, well, perhaps a few more colorful words mixed in than just that. And I think a lot of us have had some version of that moment, the moment when the canyon changes from beautiful to mathematical.
Brian:The first mile feels free because they are on the downhill. Bright Angel can make you feel smart for a while. There are people around. There are rest houses. There's water depending on the season.
Brian:There is shade in a lot of places depending on the time of the day. The trail itself is well maintained, and you can start thinking, alright, I've got this. And then you turn around, and you look up, and you realize you are feeling good, and you've come down maybe farther than you had bargained for. It's the grand deception after all, things look so close from the rim. But canyon hiking is serious serious business, and if you get yourself sucked in too deep, like people do every single day going down Bright Angel, you can look up and realize that you are in trouble.
Brian:And if it's the bad time of the year, if it's the hot time of the year, you can be in life threatening danger if you are not careful. So Pat's story also shows us how fitness and fueling are tied together. You can be under trained, but you can also be under fueled. And when both of those things happen on the climb out, things can get real in a hurry. You cannot climb out of the canyon on vibes and a sad sandwich.
Brian:Your legs need training, your body needs fuel, your lungs need to be ready for the work, and your ego needs to be willing to turn around when the smarter person in your group says, hey, maybe we have gone far enough. Maybe this is all we have today. Now to Pat's credit, she said that what she also learned from that awful experience was her wanting to give it another go, but this time she knows how to be more prepared, and that is the spirit. The point is not I suffered, therefore I am done. The point is I suffered, so what can I learn from it for the next time?
Brian:And that's kind of what this Canyon Confessions, these episodes are really all about. Okay. Let's talk about stairs. Lisa Anderson said her biggest mistake before her first canyon hike was not training enough on stairs. She said they focused too much on distance hiking, time on feet instead.
Brian:Since then, they have added a lot of stair training before each hike, and they train on natural stone steps because those are uneven and can mimic the canyon better than smooth repetitive steps, or the Stairmaster can. That's pretty smart. And then Stan Spears put it even more directly. Train more on stairs, big stairs, big steps, especially going down those stairs. Train more than you ever thought necessary.
Brian:And a mistake he made, if either knee is the slightest bit painful, like bone on bone, don't do it. That is blunt, but it is worth hearing, because this is one of the biggest differences between hiking regularly and canyon hiking. Distance is not enough. You can walk 10 miles in your neighborhood, and still not have trained the thing the canyon is going to ask of you. The Grand Canyon itself, a stair machine made of rock, ledges, awkward step downs, mule ruts, dust, heat, and consequences.
Brian:And the downhill is not a break. Let me promise you that. It might feel like it at first. I know it feels like the easy part. I know it feels like gravity's giving you a gift, but the downhill is work.
Brian:And I've experienced that more times than I care to admit myself, where you just get sucked into that downhill, it feels easy. I cannot tell you the number of times I've gotten a Phantom Ranch myself after bombing down South Kaibab and realizing that I am not feeling good. My legs hurt, my knees hurt, my feet hurt, my ankles hurt, and if you're doing rim to rim, let's say, you have a long way to go. If you're doing rim to river, you just gotta go out on Bright Angel, and you have a long way to go, Man, it can have a negative impact on the rest of your hike. So the message there is to treat the downhill seriously.
Brian:Be intentional about going downhill. Use those poles to brace you on those big step downs. Take some of the load off of your knees, transfer it to your upper body, and that step down training, as Lisa and Stan are saying, it really does matter. Uneven steps matter. Learning how to do those.
Brian:Descending under control, that intentionality that I'm telling you about, it really does matter. And if your knees are already warning you before the hike, well those warnings deserve respect, because that downhill is going to take it out of you. I a think lot of people here train for the Grand Canyon, and they think, all right, well, I need cardio. Yeah, and of course, you do need cardio, but you also need legs that can descend, legs that can climb, joints that can handle the pounding, you need feet that can survive hours of repeated impact, and you need to know how your body behaves when the trail goes down for hours before it ever goes back up. That is not normal hiking for most people.
Brian:That is canyon hiking, and I tell you, coach Arnie, he's a good one to listen to when it comes to this because he understands it better than anyone. That downhill will take it out of you, and coach Arnie has ways for you to mitigate that, and train for it, and get yourself strong, and build a strong foundation so the downhill doesn't just wipe you out. Alright. We covered a lot in this episode. There is a lot more to cover.
Brian:I mean, these are just a few of the mistakes people have made, mistakes that I have made. There are countless subjects that we can talk about, and I promise we are going to do it all. If this episode helped you, hey, do me a favor. Leave a rating or review on whatever podcast platform you're listening on. Those ratings, those reviews, they go a long way in helping us get this show in front of more Grand Canyon Hikers that need us.
Brian:I know there are a lot of them out there that have no idea that we even exist. And if we've helped you, I hope that you will help us help others. If you want more resources from us, including our Shade Tracker, our Rim to Rim eBook, our Canyon Design packs and gear, visit us at hiken.club. Hiken is the brand that my wife and I founded. It is what makes all of this possible so your support helps make sure that it all continues into the future.
Brian:We exist to help you hike your best hike and hopefully avoid the mistakes that we've all made. But if not, hey, this is a safe space to share and help us all learn what not to do so that we all might understand a little bit better of what to do on Grand Adventures. I'm Brian Special. This has been Canyon Confessions, brought to you by the Grand Canyon Hiker Dude Show. Go plan that big canyon hike.
Brian:Get after it. And we'll see you next time. Stay safe out there, everybody.