Grand Canyon from Rim to Rim in one day. Oct 17th - 18th

What a nice trip we had.
Laure and I met in Phoenix AZ, she was coming from Portland OR and I was coming from Charlotte NC. Everything worked as planned and the excitement of the trip started to get bigger and bigger as we were able to meet some of the 107 people that were going to be hiking the Grand Canyon with us.
Friday Oct 17th
This was basically a traveling day. We met all the hikers at the Palm Croft Baptist Church, where we took 2 buses that would take us from Phoenix to Kanab in UT.
In Kanab we had dinner with all the hikers and our guide, Scott, gave us all the instructions for the next day.

Something very amazing was that from all the 107 hikers, 50 were going to adventure in this trail for the very first time!
Saturday Oct 18th
The challenge has arrived. We woke up 4 am, since we had to go from Kanab to The North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which is like 90 minutes from Kanab.
We started our "Grand" hike at 6:46 am. Our goal at that point was to make it to the other side the canyon by 5:30 pm. The weather was perfect and we were feeling full of energy. The scenery was magnificent, different colors, shades, trees and stones colored the trail.

Our first major accomplishment was to get to Phantom Ranch by 11 am. This first portion of the trail is a moderate hike that does not test your strength, since you are going the whole way downhill until you reach the bottom of the canyon, however your knees and feet get all the work. (You better tape your feet before you start this portion of the trail, otherwise you can be almost certain to get blisters.

Up to this point we had covered already 14 miles. For the 2nd part of the trail we decided to take the longest one, but the one with more shade and water. From this point forward we were facing a 10 mile trail that goes upwards from the Colorado River to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Our energy levels at this point, we were feeling great and the weather was just perfect, we were also glad that we were using different muscles since we were now going up.
We just kicked ass for 6 miles. At this point (in Indian Garden) we made a pit stop. This stop proved to be a not very good thing for me, since my muscles got cold and immediately after retuning the hike I started to feel a small cramp on my left hamstring and my right calf that impeded me to keep the same pace we had until then.
Laure continued to kick ass and should I have maintained the pace we had, we would had finish the trail a lot sooner.
At 4:02 we finally reach the top of the Rim, we finalized our 38 Km or 24 miles hike with at time of 8 hours 40 minutes.




After that we chill out with some of the other hikers and wait until everybody was finished, then we took the bus back to Phoenix where we arrived at 12:30 am. This allowed us to have 4 hours of sleep before we embarked in our new adventure....... Traveling cross country from Portland OR to Charlotte NC.....(But that is another story)