Doing the Grand Canyon the right way, after the wrong way

Dad opened the back door of our station wagon and glared at me and my sister.

"Get out of the car," he said through gritted teeth.

We'd just pulled into a parking lot at Grand Canyon National Park, one of the stops on our family road trip. Tired, hot and cranky, my sister (a tween) and I (a teen) had no interest in exploring what I might have uncharitably described as "just a big hole."

Dad's demeanor made it clear that the "No" on our Magic 8 Ball was not an acceptable answer. So, with all the eyerolls and palpable disdain we could muster, my sister and I sulked at a crowded lookout spot along the canyon rim before crawling back into the air-conditioned station wagon.

Mission accomplished. I'd been to the Grand Canyon.

But even then, I knew I hadn't really been to the Grand Canyon. This dirty little secret gnawed at me for decades.

What I didn't know at the time, besides just about everything, was that Future Me would love being in the great outdoors. Especially if it involved hiking. Future Me would also be a travel writer. And a travel writer who's into hiking shouldn't have her sole trip to the Grand Canyon revolve around pouting in family photos. I needed to go back, to atone for the sins of my teenage past and give this world-renowned landmark another shot.

That's why, in my mid-50s, I signed up for Intrepid Travel's three-day hiking trip in the Grand Canyon. The compact itinerary promised treks along some of the park's most famous trails, taking us below the rim - something done by a surprisingly small percentage of the park's roughly 5 million annual visitors. Most folks simply soak up the views from the edge of the canyon, snap some selfies and move along.

The trip called for spending two nights in the historic El Tovar hotel, a National Historic Landmark built 120 years ago to accommodate well-heeled tourists arriving by rail. Reservations for El Tovar's restaurant and 78 guest rooms tend to get snapped up well in advance.

Another appealing feature of my Grand Canyon adventure sequel: This time, I'd have a guide, an expert who could enlighten me about the geology, ecology and cultural history of this space long held sacred by the Havasupai, Navajo, Hopi and other Native American tribes.

That expert turned out to be Danielle Tilley, or Dani, a seasoned guide at Wildland Trekking. (Intrepid Travel recently acquired Wildland, a Flagstaff, Ariz.-based company specializing in small-group hiking and backpacking tours.)

A dynamo of a hiker and indefatigable devotee of the canyon, Dani had an infectious enthusiasm about her outdoor office - a biodiverse, geological display of nearly 2 billion years of earth history from river to rim.

"The rocks are old but the canyon is young," Dani explained, pulling lunch supplies out of her seemingly bottomless backpack. Our picnic spot was Skeleton Point, a dusty perch overlooking the Colorado River far below.

The river carved its deep path through this rocky landscape only 6 million years ago, which is pretty recent if you're a 4.5 billion-year-old planet. The fast-flowing waterway and subsequent erosion exposed a colorful layer cake of sandstone, shale and other rock, stacked one on top of another in chronological order.

"The canyon walls are like a giant timeline," said Dani, as she passed out plates of tortilla wraps and sliced fruit to our group of five.

We'd hiked 3 miles on the South Kaibab Trail to reach our scenic pitstop at Skeleton Point. That was the easy part. We had to hike those same 3 miles to get back up to the rim, climbing 2,000 feet along the way. Temperatures heat up the further down you go in the canyon, adding to the challenge.

Hiking here can be deceptively difficult - another reason I was glad to have a guide. The National Park Service responds to an average of more than 300 search-and-rescue incidents each year, swooping in to provide medical care, water rescues and helicopter evacuations. Dani made sure we took it slow and stayed hydrated.

While we used our breaks to catch our breath, Dani took advantage of these lulls in the action to teach us more about the canyon. She told us about successful efforts to reintroduce California condors to the park and the struggle of native fish species to survive after the river was dammed. She pointed out the agave plants Indigenous people relied on as part of their diet, slowly roasting the agave hearts in dugout pits still peppered throughout the canyon. We got a sense of how important the park and its surrounding area is to Native American tribes, such as the Hopi, whose origin story traces their ancestors' emergence from the underground world to a mineral spring where the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers converge.

The canyon brims with clues about the people and animals who existed here long before the park became tourist catnip. Caves shelter the bones of giant sloths that went extinct. A salmon-colored boulder on Bright Angel Trail shows reptilian footprints dating back more than 300 million years - the oldest vertebrate fossil tracks ever found within the park's 1.2 million-acre boundaries.

On another section of the well-trodden Bright Angel Trail, in a place known as Mallery's Grotto, red paintings of deer dot the cliff face. The images were made by Native American denizens of the canyon, such as the Havasupai people who lived and farmed in the fertile grounds far below the rim. They were forcibly removed from this region in the 1920s, shortly after the Grand Canyon became a national park. At the tribe's request, this part of the park was recently renamed Havasupai Gardens.

From the rim, I took a photo of a ribbon of lush cottonwood trees sprouting from Havasupai Gardens, some 3,000 feet down. I also took photos of the canyon walls glowing in the setting sun. Let's just say that over three days, I took a lot of photos.

When I texted some of my best shots to my now grown-up sister, I got this cheeky response: "I don't want to look at these pictures," she texted back, channeling our younger selves. "I'm hot and tired."

My sister also returned to the Grand Canyon after our initial visit. She brought her three kids, who seemed to appreciate it much more than their mom and aunt did in the 1980s. The panoramic vistas, towering buttes and impossibly vast landscapes haven't changed much since then. She and I have. And that made all the difference.

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This story was originally published April 13, 2026 at 4:22 AM.