After the Fire: Uncertainty for the North Kaibab Trail
By Brian Speciale
The Grand Canyon Hiker Dude Show Podcast
TAPEATS NARROWS, Grand Canyon National Park — About six miles below the South Rim — roughly 3,500 vertical feet beneath the bustling plateau where most hikers begin their descent — the Bright Angel Trail enters one of its most distinctive stretches: a narrow bench carved directly into pale Tapeats sandstone. Here the trail is not laid atop the canyon; it is cut into it, etched across ancient rock above Garden Creek.
Below, the creek slips over a short waterfall and gathers in a clear pool before continuing toward the Colorado River, still three miles downstream. The air is cooler here. Sound is contained.
A jackhammer rattles against stone. Sledgehammers answer with heavy, deliberate blows. Steel chisels ring sharply. Then a voice carries down the corridor:
“Hikers!”
The crew steps aside as a pair of day hikers moves through — descending toward the Colorado River below. When they pass, the rhythm resumes: stone set carefully against stone, riprap fitted by hand.
Standing nearby is Adam Gibson, Trail Supervisor for Grand Canyon National Park.
This is the man responsible for maintaining the park's vast and complicated trail system.
Last July, when the Dragon Bravo Fire burned across portions of the North Rim and destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, he said the scale of it was difficult to comprehend.
“It was kinda hard to process,” Mr. Gibson said in a faint southern drawl still evident from his childhood in North Carolina. “I couldn’t make sense of it.”
“The fact that they had gotten out of there and everybody evacuated, I thought was just a miracle. I thought it was just a big win.”
Months later, in mid-February, Mr. Gibson hiked the upper North Kaibab Trail — the rugged northern gateway to one of America’s most ambitious hikes: rim to rim across the Grand Canyon, a 21- to 24-mile journey across some of the most iconic and unforgiving terrain on the planet.
It was only then he got his first look at the aftermath of the fire that made headlines around the world.
What he saw has introduced a new level of uncertainty to one of Grand Canyon's most famous routes.
“Having assessed it, seen some of the debris flows,” he said, “they are very much a red flag to me.”
An Absolute Beast of a Trail
For decades, the North Kaibab Trail has been demanding but predictable — a corridor trail built of stone retaining walls, switchbacks carved into limestone and sandstone, and a carefully maintained tread that carries hikers and mule trains between the North Rim and the Colorado River.
“The North Kaibab Trail — it is a beast of a trail,” Mr. Gibson said. “And it is just an absolute beast of a trail when all things are good.”
Even in ideal conditions, it is complex.
“There is tremendous — just huge — stone masonry walls that hold that trail together and hold the infrastructure of the pipeline,” he said. “It’s complicated when all things are good.”
The North Kaibab is not a faint backcountry track. It is a designated corridor trail — a 14-mile path from rim to river that is engineered, reinforced and maintained to the highest standard within the park’s backcountry system. It supports hikers, mule traffic and the buried water pipeline that supplies the entire park.
But above Redwall Bridge and into Roaring Springs Canyon, it has always demanded respect.
“Talking about the Roaring Springs Canyon, especially everything from Redwall Bridge and up to the trailhead, you know, that is a very active area,” Mr. Gibson said.
Even before the fire.
“Even in the best of years,” he said. “The heavier the snowpack, the heavier the snowfall up on the North Rim, the more active that area is.”
Freeze-thaw cycles loosen fractured limestone. Snowmelt accelerates runoff. Rockfall is routine. In 2023, heavy snowpack delayed the North Rim’s seasonal opening into June after significant damage along upper North Kaibab.
That was before wildfire altered the slopes above it.
Debris Flows and Red Flags
In some sections of upper North Kaibab, the damage is no longer theoretical.
The engineered corridor — built of stone retaining walls and hardened tread — has already been physically altered by post-fire runoff.
“As it is now, it’s taken out trail,” Mr. Gibson said. “It’s tearing it up.”
The Dragon Bravo Fire left behind large areas of exposed, heat-altered soil. In some places, Mr. Gibson said, the soil has become hydrophobic — meaning it repels water rather than absorbing it.
When heavy rain falls on such terrain, runoff accelerates.
In mid-February, Mr. Gibson observed debris flows powerful enough to remove sections of retaining walls and reshape drainage basins near Supai Tunnel, a popular rest point 1.7 miles below the North Rim and the turnaround point for recent mule rides.
“The main hitch rail has been taken out from the debris flows there,” he said.
Where a clean rock slab once stood near the restroom, he described deep deposits.
“It’s deposited a lot of pretty large boulders and a lot of ash and a lot of sand and woody material right there on that clean slab that is normally there next to the restroom.”
That slab is now buried beneath “about five or six feet thick of rock and ash and dirt.”
“It’s clear that it moves with some significant force in those heavy precipitation events.”
What troubled him most was how the debris behaved.
“The momentum of that wasn’t necessarily falling where the water would have traveled naturally,” he said. “It was just going where its own momentum took it.”
Such flows, he said, are a “red flag.”
Mule traffic, he added, would be all but impossible for the coming season.
Hydrophobic Slopes and Elevated Risk
In the Coconino layer between Coconino Overlook and Supai Tunnel, the soil has always been sandy and fragile.
“It’s a pretty poor source of tread material for us,” Mr. Gibson said. “Those sandy soils, they don’t like rain anyway. It doesn’t really know what to do with rain when it happens.”
After a severe burn, that tendency intensifies.
“It’s now got a deposit on the surface of it,” he said. “It makes its disdain for rain exacerbated. So it’s gonna flow, and the runoff’s gonna be even more significant than it is in normal circumstances.”
The result is an environment with heightened risk, particularly during heavy rain events.
“One thing that is clear to me is when we do have rain events up there, that is gonna be a more hostile area than users are gonna be used to.”
He did not hedge the longer-term outlook.
“There are gonna be heightened levels of risk associated with using that trail moving forward, I think, for the next several years.”
And, plainly:
“There’s no way that all the hazards are gonna be able to mitigate. It’s just not realistic.”
When asked if he and his crews would be able to build everything back to what it was before the fire, he was even more direct.
“No. Time’s gonna have to do that. Recovery is gonna have to do that.”
Mr. Gibson did notice vegetation such as scrub oak and New Mexican locust has begun to sprout in burned areas, offering promise of slope stabilization over time.
“That’s a real positive sign in my opinion,” he said.
But ecological recovery cannot be accelerated by construction alone.
Downstream: A Watershed Changed
The concerns do not end at Supai Tunnel.
Several burn-scarred drainages that originate at rim level feed directly into Bright Angel Canyon and the perpetual Bright Angel Creek, which runs alongside the lower North Kaibab Trail for more than eight miles. That water eventually funnels through a narrow inner gorge known as “The Box” — a constricted section of canyon downstream from Cottonwood Campground where flash flooding has long been a seasonal threat.
In the wake of the Dragon Bravo Fire, park officials have installed additional rain gauges and refined flood-monitoring systems. Warning signage has appeared at Phantom Ranch and along corridor routes. A new evacuation framework has been developed for the Phantom Ranch and Bright Angel Campground area, though full operational details have not been publicly released.
The additional monitoring equipment and revised evacuation planning reflect a recognition that watershed behavior has changed.
The reason is simple: burned watersheds behave differently.
When soil becomes hydrophobic and vegetation is stripped away, rainfall that once soaked into the ground now runs off rapidly. Tributaries spike faster. Drainages carry more sediment. Flood pulses can intensify.
While Mr. Gibson’s primary responsibility is the North Kaibab Trail itself, the watershed that feeds it — and drains from it — is interconnected.
Heavy rain on the upper North Rim does not stay there.
It moves.
And when asked about the potential for debris torrents and flood pulses moving through the system, Mr. Gibson did not minimize the concern.
“Those are very real threats,” he said.
Rebuilding in Stone
Rehabilitation will require extensive stonework.
“We’re certainly gonna be putting a lot of effort into building stone walls and laying hand-laid stone riprap through sections of the Coconino,” Mr. Gibson said.
Riprap interlocks with retaining walls and bedrock to create what he described as “a strong, united front.”
“It’s about the best thing we can do to set it up to be successful and to withstand a lot of the future debris flow that’s gonna be coming through there.”
Comparable work across the canyon on the South Kaibab Trail unfolded over multiple construction cycles between 2009 and 2012 and again from 2020 to 2022 — roughly five years of concentrated effort.
“That’s the kind of time it takes to build that level of construction,” he said. “It takes a lot of time.”
Short-term clearing and wall rebuilding can be done. But Mr. Gibson stresses it will be a more time-consuming process than years past because of the constant threat from above, and the uncertainty of what that ultimately means.
“Progress is gonna be slower than normal for us in the rehabilitation just because the area — there’s an elevated level of risk.”
That risk applies especially to workers.
“They’re in these zones for nine to ten hours a day.”
In the past, crews have worked during monsoon season.
“We do that quite frankly all the time,” he said.
“But we’re not gonna be doing it so much in that situation just because the risk is higher.”
The implication is straightforward: if conditions are considered unsafe for crews working beneath those slopes for extended periods, they present risk for anyone moving through them — including hikers.
It is a quiet shift in posture — and an indication that conditions have changed.
The Question Everyone Is Asking
The National Park Service has said it is “aiming” to reopen portions of the North Rim on its traditional May 15 opening date, weather and conditions permitting. It has not committed to a timeline for reopening the North Kaibab Trail.
For the Grand Canyon hiking community — and for shuttle operators, lodges and other businesses tied to rim-to-rim season — the question is simple: When?
Mr. Gibson emphasized that reopening decisions rest with Superintendent Ed Keable and park leadership.
“Ultimately, the decision to close or reopen a trail is the responsibility of the superintendent,” he said. “And I will respect their decision.”
He also described a scenario hikers must consider.
“If we get a heavy monsoon event that hammers the upper North Kaibab,” he said, “that could cause some pretty significant damage pretty quick.”
The relatively dry winter so far has been, in his words, fortunate. But that comes with a caveat: the lack of precipitation has not sufficiently tested the watershed, leading to even more uncertainty about how the trail and the area around it will respond.
“Until we see it happen,” he said, “we’re just not going to be able to know fully.”
Back in the Tapeats Narrows, another call echoes off the sandstone.
“Hikers!”
Another small group passes through the work zone, heading up from the river.
A year ago, many rim-to-rim hikers followed this exact path after descending North Kaibab from the opposite rim. They will again — someday.
“The North Kaibab Trail is a beast,” Mr. Gibson again says.
“It can be fixed. And we will fix it.”
The work itself is not expected to start until mid-April. Maybe later, depending on conditions.
But reopening will not be dictated by pressure or expectation. It will come when the trail is ready — and when it is safe for the people who walk it and the crews who rebuild it. Nobody knows what North Kaibab will look like a year from now. But Mr. Gibson is clear about the standard he intends to uphold.
"It will be a success from my perspective if if we have fixed and protected and set up that trail to the best of our abilities to be able to withstand some of the impacts that it's gonna be facing for the foreseeable future," he said. "And that we have kept the people that built it safe, and they're going back to their families safe and sound. That'll be a big win for me."
----
(The quotes in this article are from the transcript of Episode 103 of The Grand Canyon Hiker Dude Show podcast, which premieres Wednesday, March 4. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts.)
