LogFAQs > #942579962

I was in the process of putting together a long story but couldn't really figure out what details to include or skip and it was feeling kind of run-on so I'll just cover the bullet points and you can ask questions if you want.

-Monday, July 20th at 7:45 AM my wife and I started down the North Kaibab Trail. Our plan was to get down to Roaring Springs and then back up. It's about 5 miles each way with an elevation change of around 3500 ft.

-We made it down without incident and rested at the bottom around noon. There were some restrooms at the bottom of the trail and a somewhat flat spot where we were able to rest near a creek.

-We started back up about 1 PM, but less than 30 minutes into the trip back up I knew there was a problem. I had been drinking plenty of water and eating salty foods, but progress was slow, we were less than 10% of the way back up and I started throwing up all the liquid I had left in me. We had each brought 40 oz canteens and I was carrying an extra gallon of water in my backpack which seemed like plenty of water for our hike, but I threw up a bunch at this point and my body was having trouble keeping any more water down.

-At around 2 PM I knew that based upon how I was feeling and how unable I was to press on or keep anything down that I was not going to make it to the top under my own power. We were still pretty close to the bottom of the trail. From the trail earlier we had seen a Helipad just a bit off the trail and we saw helicopters dropping people off and picking people up every 30 minutes or so. We hadn't seen any obvious way to *reach* the helipad but we knew it was there and it didn't seem very far off the trail. We decided to try and reach the helipad and ask for help. We assumed this was a helipad for canyon tours and things like that, and that these were tourists that were coming and going.

-We reach a part of the trail where we're maybe a football field away from the helipad. It's so close we can almost taste it. It's below us, but we see a stretch that looks like we should be able to climb down and reach it. We make our way down a fairly steep bit, but one thing we couldn't see from the trail was that there was a ledge above a 20-25 foot drop we could't progress any further. We have a clear view of the helipad and it's maybe 100 feet away or less at this point. We also don't feel comfortable going back up the route we had just taken to reach the ledge we were on. We're stuck. On a ledge that was less than 4 feet wide, and was very uneven with loose rocks. It's about 4 PM at this point. 3 more helicopters came and went over the next 90 minutes and despite our brightly colored clothing and waving our arms they didn't appear to notice us.

-We were on the ledge until 7 AM the next morning. We tried to sleep but there wasn't much room and it was scary knowing that if we rolled the wrong way in our sleep that could be the end of us. We did have some supplies though. I had packed a survival kit that is normally in the trunk of my car. It had emergency rations (we weren't hungry), extra drinking water, one of those foil blankets (it was actually uncomfortably warm all night so this became a pillow), a 12 hour glow stick, a whistle, a poncho and a few other things.

-I wish I could say the stay on the ledge was uneventful, but at about 2 AM I reached to move the glowstick (I think I was going to try and stand up to urinate), but when I was setting my left hand down I felt an immediate fiery pain in the tip of my finger. Something had bitten or stung me. I flipped the light on my phone in the area as quickly as I could but I didn't see anything there so I couldn't identify what it was. Over the next two hours the burning in my finger spread up my arm until my entire arm up to my shoulder felt like it was on fire. The pain didn't get any worse at this point, but it also didn't get any better for nearly 2 days, so for the rest of this just keep in mind that I still had use of my left hand/arm, but any time I used it to do anything I was met with excruciating pain.

-At 7 AM we decided to leave the ledge and try and make it back to the trail. My wife had gotten maybe 2 or 3 hours of sleep and I had maybe 90 minutes that I got before I got strung by whatever. I wasn't sure we were going to be able to make it back up the section we had gone down, but it seemed better than hoping for more helicoptors to not notice us. It took us about half an hour but we struggled our way back to the main trail, and I felt even less prepared to walk to the top of the rim than I did the day before. One thing we did note however is that the bottom of the trail where we had rested had some restrooms and there was a creek that ran nearby. It appeared that the same creek wound its way next to the helipad as well. So we decided to go back to where we had stopped for lunch the day before and to follow the water to the helipad.

-Again this was no true path, the path through the water was maybe a mile long and there was more of an elevation difference between where the creek started and where it crossed next to the helipad. There were multiple drops in the water of 10-15 feet, and in some instances they were sloped and we could ride the rocks down like a steep slide, and in other cases we had to exit the water and try and find sections on land that would take us back down to the water. For the most part we tried to stay in the water and simply wade through it, it was maybe 3 feet at the deepest but was generally shallow so we did a lot of wading. It was also very overgrown with scratchy trees, but after about an hour of this we finally reached the helipad, with our arms and legs very scratched and irritated, and with us starting to run low on our water at this point.


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~C~ FD
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