One Bad Step In A Grand Canyon Misadventure

By Brian Speciale
The Grand Canyon Hiker Dude Show Podcast

Gary and Amy Teal have a way of making Grand Canyon misfortune sound almost reasonable.

Not easy. Not painless. Certainly not recommended.

But reasonable, at least in the way canyon people sometimes use the word after the fact, when the swelling has gone down, the surgery is scheduled, the story has been told, and the part that might have been frightening in real time has already begun turning into memory.

They are not elite athletes. They do not talk like people selling a dream. Amy has described herself as a slow hiker with a stubborn streak, the kind of person who can make it about five miles in the canyon before needing to stop and sleep. Gary is dry, observant, funny in the way people are funny when they know the joke is partly on them.

Together, they have become familiar figures in the Hike Club Grand Canyon community: Texans who love summer canyon travel, Phantom Ranch meals, careful notes, and the kind of adventure that seems to arrive with a complication already packed inside it.

This time, the plan was nine days below the rim, bouncing between Phantom Ranch and corridor campgrounds before heading toward the North Rim and back again.

In an earlier interview with The Grand Canyon Hiker Dude Show, Amy told the story of a previous trip in which ravens started tearing through their campsite near Phantom Ranch. Gary hurried toward the mess, tripped, and hit his face on one of the rocks bordering the trail.

“He ended up bashing in teeth,” Amy said. “Displaced teeth, two cracked teeth. And this was day two of an eight-day itinerary.”

Amy cleaned up the blood, ran to Phantom Ranch for ice, and began thinking they should abort the trip and get Gary to emergency dental care. Gary took a nap. Then he announced he wanted to hike the river loop from bridge to bridge.

“Dude, you should be resting,” Amy told him.

Gary went anyway.

That is useful context for what happened on their latest trip, because Gary and Amy’s Grand Canyon stories rarely turn on the simple question of whether something went wrong.

Something often does.

The better question is what they do next.

The Bad Step

The plan began with a descent of South Kaibab and was supposed to continue toward Phantom Ranch, Bright Angel Campground, Cottonwood, the North Rim and back.

South Kaibab is one of the great trails in Grand Canyon National Park, a ridge-walking descent of open views, exposed switchbacks and little mercy. It is also a trail where the direction of travel can fool people. Down feels like progress until it does not. The rim disappears behind you. The river seems to rise. The work of getting out is postponed.

Gary and Amy waited for the sun before starting. The early morning was cool enough that, for them, predawn sounded less like strategy than punishment.

They made Cedar Ridge around 7:30 a.m. Everything was going well.

“It was just a perfect kind of corridor trail experience,” Gary told The Grand Canyon Hiker Dude Show.

Then the weather changed.

In the canyon, a storm does not sneak up so much as announce itself from a distance. You can see it crossing the rock. You can watch it coming and still misjudge what it will mean when it reaches you.

“Bad weather is so dramatic in the canyon,” Gary said. “You can see there’s a rainstorm five miles away from here, and you know that it’s coming. In a way, it gives you more of a sense of dread because you can see it headed your direction.”

He had about 40 pounds on his back, more than he normally carried. The Tipoff shelter was close enough to see. Rain was coming hard. Maybe, Gary said, he was moving faster than he should have.

Then the pack shifted.

“Once the 40 pounds started heading in the wrong direction,” he said, “it was a little more than I could handle to get it balanced again. And so over I went.”

He compared it to slipping on ice. One moment there is a trail, a pack, a destination. The next, the body is on the ground before the mind has caught up.

“I took a bad step,” Gary said. “As I hit the ground, I looked down and realized I had twisted it badly. The first instant my eyes saw it, I thought, this is not good news.”

He was talking about his ankle.

Amy was about 20 feet ahead, just around a curve. Their system was simple. If she looked back and did not see him, she called out, “Marco.” Gary would answer, “Polo.”

This time, there was no answer.

She called his name louder.

“I fell,” he said.

Amy dropped her pack and went back up the trail.

Slow Grit

The Teals were lucky in one important way. The fall happened near the Tipoff shelter, about four and a half miles and roughly 3,200 vertical feet below the South Rim.

Gary later called it “no place better in the whole canyon to have an accident.”

That is not the same as a good place.

South Kaibab has no potable water. The shelter has benches and an emergency phone, but it is still deep in the canyon, still exposed, still far from any easy exit. A hiker with a badly injured ankle does not have many options there. The rim is a brutal climb above. The river is still miles below. The helicopter is not a taxi.

A lone hiker coming up from below helped carry Gary’s pack down to the shelter just as the rain hit hard.

“Like a real hero like you see every time you go to the canyon,” Gary said, “he dropped his pack and started down with mine.”

Amy got Gary to the shelter, gave him pain medication, spread out a sleeping pad and elevated his foot. Then she used the emergency phone to contact rangers.

At that point, they were not asking for a rescue. They were assessing.

That distinction matters.

There is a sign at the Bright Angel Transportation desk, Amy said, reminding hikers that they need to be prepared to self-rescue. The Teals took that seriously. They knew there were emergency resources in the canyon, including helicopters and lockboxes. They also knew those resources were limited.

“We did not want to dip into either of those unless it was life-threatening,” Amy said. “We didn’t want to use up resources in case somebody else showed up and needed the water, needed the meds, needed whatever it was.”

Their conclusion at the shelter was measured.

“This is not yet a life-threatening emergency,” Amy said.

Gary added, “And it wasn’t going to become one.”

Another hiker appeared with help of a different kind. She was not a doctor, Gary said. She was a veterinarian. But she knew how to wrap a joint, and she wrapped his ankle well enough that it changed the calculus.

“Having the support on my ankle really made a big difference,” Gary said.

They waited about four hours.

Then came the test.

Amy was not convinced Gary could walk the rest of the way down. Gary was not convinced Amy should have to make her way out alone. They had water, but not enough to turn time into an unlimited resource. In the canyon, Gary said, water consumption is a function of hours, not miles.

Amy asked him to walk to the latrine and back.

He did it with poles. It hurt. But it was enough.

“There is a thing that takes over,” Gary said. “At some point I was thinking, this hurts. And then I was thinking, so what? It hurts, but I really need to get to a bed. I really don’t want to spend the night on the trail. I don’t want my wife to spend the night on the trail.”

So they traded packs. Gary took the smaller one. Amy carried the heavier load.

Gary calls Amy “slow grit.”

On that evening, the name fit.

They made Phantom Ranch around 10:30 p.m., roughly 15 or 16 hours after the day had begun. The door to their cabin was open. The air conditioner was on.

There was no stew dinner waiting for them.

But there was a bed.

The Trip Changes Shape

By morning, the original itinerary was already gone.

The Teals were not going to Cottonwood. Not yet. Maybe not at all.

Gary’s ankle was swelling. The pain was increasing. A ranger paramedic later assessed it as a likely grade two sprain. No one in the canyon had X-ray vision, Amy noted, and the initial advice was reasonable for what they knew: rest, ice, compression, elevation and moderate use.

So they waited.

That became the hidden strength of the trip.

“The biggest thing we had going for us,” Amy said, “was just the ability to sit around and wait and assess.”

Gary still imagined hiking out. He still wanted Plateau Point. It had been closed for years, and he felt the finite nature of future canyon trips.

Then the foot kept getting worse.

By Saturday morning, the bruising, swelling and pain had progressed enough that the conversation shifted. The rangers had determined Gary should be flown out by helicopter. If anything, Amy said, the hard work was talking Gary into accepting the ride.

Gary did not want to give up.

Amy had a simpler diagnosis.

“That was the testosterone talking,” she said.

Eventually, Gary listened.

The helicopter evacuation was not treated like a scenic flight. Gary described flight suits, gloves, helmets, a detailed briefing and a crew that was friendly but all business.

“It should be emphasized that it’s not a taxi service,” he said. “It’s a big deal.”

From the air, Gary got something he had wanted, though not in the way he had imagined. He saw Plateau Point from above.

“I got my wish,” he said. “I got to see Plateau Point from a different angle, and it meant a lot to me.”

Amy saw it differently.

The flight was cool, she said. The view of trails scratched into canyon walls was remarkable. But if given the choice, she would rather be on the trail.

“If someone says, ‘We’ll give you a free helicopter ride down or up,’ I’m like, you know what? If I can hike, I would really prefer to hike it and see it and spend that time.”

Afterward, Gary learned the injury was worse than they had known below the rim. He had breaks in his tibia and fibula and later underwent surgery.

Still, when he looked back on the trip, he resisted the expected moral.

“It shouldn’t be for anyone an example of why you don’t go to the Grand Canyon,” he said. “It’s an example of why you do go.”

Why They Keep Going Back

There is an easy version of this story, and it is not the best one.

The easy version says a hiker fell, broke bones, suffered down South Kaibab and got flown out of the canyon. That version is true, but too thin.

The fuller version has two people in it.

It has Amy calling “Marco” into the wind and knowing something was wrong when no “Polo” came back.

It has Gary, sprawled on the ground in pain, still noticing the stranger who took his pack down toward shelter.

It has a veterinarian wrapping an ankle, rangers answering phones, Phantom Ranch staff adjusting rooms, and a community of hikers offering help afterward.

It has Amy measuring risk without panic and Gary making jokes from the middle of a bad day.

It has a couple who have already been through enough canyon weirdness to know that a plan is not sacred. People are.

Gary and Amy did not get the trip they came for. They got four days with Gary’s foot elevated, meals at Phantom Ranch, ranger check-ins, ice, altered plans, and a helicopter ride neither of them wanted.

Gary still called it a great trip.

“This stopped being as big an adventure as it was planned to be,” he said, “but it became more of a vacation.”

That may sound absurd unless you understand what the canyon does to people who love it. It does not have to behave kindly to keep them. It only has to remain itself: immense, indifferent, beautiful, demanding, occasionally generous, and full of strangers who become part of the story at exactly the right time.

Gary said he would go back even if someone told him the next trip would be similar.

“Even if somebody said, you’ll be in pain and you’ll have to get a helicopter out, it was a great trip,” he said. “I really, really enjoyed it.”

Ultimately, the Grand Canyon did not give Gary and Amy the adventure they planned.

But it still gave them one — one that asked more of them than they ever expected.