This is the Grand Canyon Hiker Dude Show presented by Hiken.

Hiking plus kinship.

That's Hiken.

Together, we roam.

Here's your host, my hubby, and cofounder of Hiken, Brian Special.

Alright.

This time, a conversation with true Grand Canyon royalty.

His name is Bruce Aiken.

And today, just after his 70 birthday, he settled in Flagstaff, about an hour and fifteen minute drive from the South Rim.

But for thirty three years, he lived and raised a family at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Somehow, an aspiring artist in late nineteen sixties Manhattan would hitchhike his way west, leaving the hustle and bustle of the big city behind for a landscape that's among the most remote in the country, the North Rim Of The Grand Canyon.

There Bruce joined the crew responsible for maintaining the North Kaibab Trail and it wasn't long after that he discovered the cabin at Roaring Springs, where the person responsible for running the pump house resided.

Well, as luck would have it, that person was retiring.

The job was open.

This was 1973, and Bruce knew he had to have it.

He dreamed of being able to practice his true passion, his painting, in one of the most unique and inspiring and spellbinding landscapes on Earth.

Problem was, he knew nothing about managing or maintaining a water facility like Roaring Springs, which provides the potable water for the entire park, including the North And South Rims.

But when you want something badly enough, you're sometimes willing to say and do anything to get it.

And somehow, Bruce was able to talk his way into the job with the NPS.

That was 1973.

He'd stay at Roaring Springs more than five miles and 3,500 feet below the North Kaibab Trailhead until he stepped down in 02/2005, ending a true fake it till you make it success story.

Over the years, the little cabin at Roaring Springs hosted a growing family.

It started with Bruce and his wife, Mary, and expanded with the additions of Mercy, Shirley and Silas.

I recently sat down with Bruce in his downtown Flagstaff studio for a wide ranging conversation about his life, his time in the canyon, and of course, the impact of the Dragon Bravo fire on the land he knows and loves.

So Bruce, it's been right at 20 now since you since you left Roaring Springs.

And the last quote I found from you about it was in 02/2016, and you were quoted as saying simply, I miss it terribly.

You still feel that way?

Well, yes, for sure.

And there's no going back to anything remotely as as unique as that.

We knew we knew with all our hearts, we knew how unique it was when we were there.

And when we were leaving, we also knew that we would never ever ever be able to replace this setting anywhere under any circumstances.

Not like this.

We're sitting here in your your studio in Downtown Flagstaff in a building that you just told me.

It was built in 1888, and I'm looking at all your incredible artwork on the walls and what you're working on today.

But what really stands out for the purposes of what we're talking about today is the shingle that's just kinda off there to the side,

and it says, b a Aiken private residence.

I bet that has a lot of meaning to you.

Yeah.

That that little sign was made by a ranger, park service ranger, who actually was stationed at Phantom Ranch, but he liked to do woodworking.

And he made that little sign for me in probably nineteen eighty ish.

Sent that up the trail, you know, via a different ranger who was on patrol or something and got delivered, I immediately put it up and stayed up for the remainder of the time we were there.

We engaged hikers on a daily basis.

Yeah.

What would they say when they found out that someone lived down there?

When they saw a private residence, I bet most of them had no idea.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They oh, yeah.

Most of them had no idea.

But over the course of time though, many learned that we were there.

And because of of people like you, the media had found us.

It didn't take long.

Probably the mid to late seventies, they were already coming down and interviewing.

Yeah.

It started almost right away.

Pretty fascinating story.

The man who lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with his family.

Right?

Yeah.

And then and then as the artwork took off, which it super took off in the eighties, the path was beaten down by media.

Coming coming down, and they all had to get permission from the Park Service to come down and interview and that kind of stuff.

I wanna get back to your story.

It's so fascinating, we can spend a lot of time talking about it.

I wanna come back to it, but the thing that's really pressing right now, and you with so much experience and it being such a big part of your life, obviously, is what's happened with the Dragon Bravo fire.

And I'm just curious, from your perspective, when you started to get the news trickling in about what was happening, and it happened fast.

Started as a, you know, essentially a controlled burn.

Next thing you know, they're evacuating North Rim, then the lodge is gone.

Just what's going through your mind as that whole thing is happening happening, and and you're watching this all happen from from here?

Well yeah.

So there's this line from a Dylan song, I think, right away.

Oh, no.

No.

I've seen this story before.

You know?

I have seen that story before.

And we there was Northrim evacuated in '19 not 1999, February, 2000.

Terrible fire called the outlet fire burned and swept across the area, but they were able to turn that fire away from the the you know, the fire crews are amazing guys, and I'm I'm I'm very proud of the National Park Service and the way they have managed things on the North Kaibab Plateau and in the park.

But I've seen this before, and it's not anything out of the blue because the Kaibab Plateau is I wouldn't call it a sitting duck, but it's been a hundred years of suppression has built up so much understory.

Downfall, windfall, They call a lot of that debris on a forest floor.

They call it duff.

It's just fuels that should have been consumed by smaller fire smaller fires that are natural cause that would just creep sweep through the forest floor and and burn all that stuff up and keep the forest floor clear and keep, you know, the young trees growing thinned out so that it doesn't become too crowded, which it became because of suppression.

And this is not my area to be really going into this kind of stuff because I'm not an expert, and and I don't speak for the park service or the forest service or the fire suppression people.

But I'm I have known that that and seen many things happen up there.

And over the years and the decades that I've been on the North Kaibab Plateau, and that's going back to the early nineteen seventies, 1972, that forest has become more and more clogged with windfall, logs, dead trees, and I guess forest floor debris that that is just building up and building up.

So sadly, they could not turn this fire.

Sadly, this fire was incredibly powerful.

And once that wind started, there was no controlling it.

And everybody knows these kind of things happen.

Big fires all over the West.

Same thing.

Wind gets out of control.

Nature's in control, not us.

Were you still surprised though that it got to the the point that it did where where it took out the lodge and then so much of the the developed area?

Yes.

Very much surprised me.

I thought for sure that would be the last thing that might burn.

All the forest around there would burn, but they saved the lodge, the forest the ranger station, all all the all the residences and things.

Usually, that's where most of the effort is and and and rightfully so.

But I don't know the circumstances, and I don't know what was going through fire management's heads at that time.

And I was not on the North Rim to see their their actions and and and what they were doing.

So I can't report for them.

Sure.

What did

the loss of the lodge mean to you personally?

Because this is a place that I don't know.

It was it was essentially the beacon on the hill for you and your family for so many years.

What what did that place mean to you and your family?

Not so much a beacon on the hill for us, but definitely a destination.

I would say the beacon on the hill was the trailhead, finally arriving to the top where then things like the lodge would be available to us.

The lodge itself is iconic, and I can say that in my personal view, the Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim was probably the most iconic lodge in Arizona for sure.

It's like the El Tovar also has a story on the South Rim, and it's older.

But that Grand Lodge on the North Rim with that patio and the deck behind it where you could go and literally sit on the brink of the canyon or come into that sunroom from the lobby of the hotel and drop down those steps into the sunroom.

And suddenly, this massive thing emerges and it's the Grand Canyon.

It's like no lodge on the South Rim has that.

That's why I say it's probably the most iconic.

And this is where I met clients and my best people and my family used we had dinner there so many times, countless, countless times.

And I know all the operators of the lodge, the managers, the chef, I knew everybody.

So it's sad.

So you understand the dev the so many people are just still feeling so devastated to this.

Devastated.

Absolutely devastated.

It's it's a devastating thing for Arizona, for Northern Arizona, for the park service, for the concessionaire, devastating.

It's like all those jobs that were lost due to the fire, that's a huge economic impact.

Huge.

You know, another thing, Bruce, before Roaring Springs happened, you came to the canyon, and you were working on the trail trail crew on North North Kaibab.

Yeah.

That was in the 1972.

So seeing that, knowing that, knowing what you know about the trail itself, which obviously has not changed that much over the years, and seeing the damage that's been done to it.

I'm curious if you have a perspective on

what the fate of North Kaibab might ultimately be.

I can't predict what the powers that be will do, and it's not even my position to comment on on their choices.

But my personal thoughts have ranged from it's probably not gonna be rebuilt for many, many, many years.

We won't see that North Rim as it was for many years, and and that has to do with a lot of things.

The trailhead, we know it burned the forest, which was a very plush fir, aspen, and blue spruce forest around the North Kaibab Trailhead and over the rim and down for the first mile.

I'd say that section of trail alone is probably my favorite section of mountain trail anywhere in Arizona because it was so plush and beautiful.

Yeah.

And the cliffs and the opening opening scenic grandeur that would emerge.

But back when I first started there and I saw that place, I just was in love instantly seeing that there was something this beautiful, this available, and wide open for me as an artist.

I felt compelled to be there in every single way, artistically.

I mean, I know it's been fifty five years since you were on that trail crew, and I don't know how much knowledge you still have of of the techniques and what needs to be done and the damage that we could be looking at when it comes to to that stretch in North Kaibab.

Is it the is it the fear of the flooding?

Is it you know, even the section down below that didn't burn below Supai Tunnel, I assume in in the early seventies that that was still as much of a problem as it is today in terms of rock slides and landslides and the the spring runoff and the monsoons.

So is that the fear?

Is it the flooding more than anything that you think is gonna delay any chance of of North Kaibab reopening anytime soon?

I can't comment what the park service will do.

Of course.

I Just your perspective from your

tell you that that that trail is delicate between between the tunnel and the bridge.

Those are the supi formation switchbacks.

Those switchbacks are built into a talus slope.

Most of those switchbacks are just cut into a talus slope, not on bedrock.

Now there is some bedrock there where it comes off the talus slope briefly, cuts back into an alcove, comes back out again and back into another talus slope.

And it's the talus slope that is moving.

And during a high spring runoff, certainly, that that ground gets saturated.

It can get saturated during heavy snow winter and heavy rains, especially, and the slumping will occur.

It's just going to do that.

That's what what teleslopes are are moving, and the vegetation is not that much on that slope.

It's dry.

It's almost a south facing dry desert telescope with just brush on it, and it moves.

It it most definitely moves.

So And when you say slumping, you mean that the the Earth essentially

Slump.

Yes.

The Earth slumps.

Big big chunks of it just start to move.

I see.

There's also a big chalkstone that is, I'd say, below the tunnel right after maybe the third switchback, you go past a massive chunk of I think it's sup high sandstone that's lying on its side, and it's as big as a dump truck or bigger.

And it is helping to hold up a lot of that section of trail in my view.

Again, I'm not an expert on that stuff, but I've seen a lot, experienced a lot, and I've watched that chalk stone for many years, and it's lying on its side, a massive massive flat slab when you see it from the helicopter or from up high upper like an upper view looking down on it.

You can see that stone.

It's there, and it may decide to move.

And if that if that moves, it's gonna take out all those switchbacks.

Oh, wow.

Every one of them will be gone, but that has happened before.

This is not a new thing there.

After that, a 1966 sick that huge flood, and that was probably the flood of the the thousand year flood, that that December 6566 thing.

That took out that whole section as well.

And I wasn't there then, but boy, everybody was talking about it when I got there in 1972.

It was still the big talk, the flood this, the flood that.

And they had to rebuild that whole section there after everything settled.

I don't know how long that it was closed, but it was closed for a long time, I'm sure, because most of those switchbacks left town.

I mean, they just slumped away.

So then the fear becomes that it's gonna be potentially even worse because of the burn scar from above, and there's nothing that's gonna hold that back, and it can come crashing down on these sections we're talking Yeah.

That is a possibility.

Yeah.

That absolutely is.

And and and anybody that is has studied fire at all, and after what happens, the aftermath of a big fire, floods are one of the big things that happen when downpours occur.

Rain, you know, heavy monsoon rains or winter rains, rain on top of a snowpack, boy, that will produce a flood right now.

And if there's nothing there to hold it, certainly it can be very disastrous and bring down rocks, boulders, tree whole trees, and then all types of burnt material, logs and ash and other debris will just come roaring down in a mess.

Yeah.

That's the that's the fear.

You know?

One thing

of the fears.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One there there are plenty of fears.

You can

make a list.

There's another bigger one.

What's the

bigger one?

The water supply.

The North Kaibab Watershed area that supplies Roaring Springs.

Yeah.

And you may wanna consider talking to somebody else who's an expert hydrologist on the North Kaibab Plateau.

Yeah.

And really get the drill on that.

But that spring, it's well established where the I guess the watershed is is it's exactly to the north of of the trailhead area over to the left and the right, over to the east and west.

There's a there's a basin there that feeds Roaring Springs, and that's where that groundwater originates.

And there is a lot of groundwater in in the formation.

It's it's in the Redwall Muav Aquifer there.

The the spring itself, Roaring Springs itself is coming out of the base of the Muav limestone through a cavern network.

It's an underground river coming out of there.

Yeah.

So so if you're not familiar with this, anyone listening, we're talking about Roaring Springs, provides the water for the North Rim and the South Rim, of course, and everything inside the, inside the canyon.

The whole park.

The whole park.

Yeah.

The whole park.

And that water, comes from the Kaibab Plateau, much of which has burned.

And so there are studies underway right now to see what kind of an impact that is going to have on the water that comes out of Roaring Springs.

And you obviously handled the water at Roaring Springs for so many years.

Did you ever have to deal with any fire influenced water that was coming through there?

Certainly not to this magnitude.

And what is the the fear for not just the water supply, but the I mean, the equipment down there?

I mean, it has all kinds of an effect when when you've got ash laden water essentially that can that can come through there.

Yeah.

Turbidity is Turbidity.

To call that.

Yeah.

And there are legal limits, you know, surrounding turbidity in public water supplies.

The water does look darker in those heavy spring runoff years, but it's still it's still potable water.

It's been treated, and it's good quality water for drinking even though the turbidity is is visible is visible.

It's actually not a health issue from what I understand.

It's more of a of a user acceptance issue because the color of the water is you can actually see that a little bit.

It's slightly cloudy.

That's turbidity, but it can be very bad in some cases, and we have yet to see what will happen.

And you don't think we'll know that until the spring runoff?

If if we get any snow.

If it's another dry winter, we won't really probably know the answer to that till next year's monsoon season.

Maybe there will be some heavy monsoons that produce tremendous amounts of rain, And we will know then for sure probably about everything.

The answer is what will reveal themselves, nature will show.

You know, the canyon is underway.

It's it's underway as as it always has been, and this is this could be a big event.

Does the Park Service have to plan for that at Roaring Springs in case the worst case happens?

Do they need to be prepared with the equipment?

Right

now, and I'm sure they have a worst case scenario document.

What is what is the worst case scenario in your eyes?

Failure of Roaring Springs.

It's no longer usable water.

They can't they can't even clean it enough.

Bright Angel Creek becomes nonusable because it's so debris laden, so turbid, it can't be cleaned properly with with techniques that we already have.

And all that being said, I think there's a lot to learn here, and nature is going to have to reveal a lot of things to us.

I know that the park service though has some very smart people, very smart people, and they're not wasting any time sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting to see what nature's going to do.

They're actively doing research.

I know they are.

Oh, my God.

We're at we're at the beginning of this, aren't we?

We are at the beginning of this.

And and nature is gonna be the one who tells us what what the end result will be.

We can only wait, but do some preparation.

If scenario one happens, we can do this.

Scenario two happens, maybe we can do this.

Scenario three, we just don't know yet.

And but I know the NPS, especially the guys there at Grand Canyon National Park, very smart people, and I would trust I would trust their studies.

And I'm sure they're also getting outside help, you know, consultations and all, you know, all kinds of things because that water supply is serious business.

Yeah.

If the worst case were to happen, what does that mean practically for the park?

I can't answer that question, but I can give some thoughts as to scenarios that may appear.

For example, if Bright Angel Creek becomes so turbid year round because of debris that has washed off the rim, ash, and and so forth and other things, you know, other silts and things that show up, it could become very silty.

The intake system for the new water system that is being constructed at Phantom Ranch at the moment, it's underway.

And the intake for that will be Bright Angel Creek.

So they have yet to even begin to talk about that because that system is not even in service yet.

And so that's all mystery out there, and I'm sure the park service guys are also working on that as well because that's going to be the South Rims water supply right there.

The pipeline is going to be abandoned from what I understand from Cottonwood Campground South all the way to Phantom Ranch.

That chunk of the Trans Canyon Pipeline, which is buried under the trail, by the way, that chunk of pipe is going to be abandoned because that's where most of the breaks occur, is in the box above above Phantom.

That's where the breaks occur.

Bad ones.

The pipe is is literally self destructing now.

It's that old.

So the water that's piped to the

South Rim now is going to start at the new facility

From the

Bright Angel Delta.

Yes.

Yes.

Essentially, right there on the river.

Yes.

Yes.

That's that's where the new intake is.

Roaring Springs will will continue to work as the main park source for a while here.

But eventually, though, it'll only be for the North Rim.

But let's look at this case scenario.

If they decide not to, you know, run the North Rim as they have in the past and make it a day use only area.

And, again, here I'm speculating.

This is not what the

park service has said Of course.

Or announced, and I don't know what they're planning.

But I know they're gonna plan something that's that's gonna be good.

I trust them.

But the North Rim is in a disaster mode right now for a couple of reasons.

And one of the main ones is that the wastewater treatment plant burned.

That's one of the that's one of the buildings that burned.

Half the maintenance yard burned.

So realistically, even if they did build a new lodge, there's still no wastewater treatment plant.

And we're not having another lodge without a, you know, modern wastewater treatment plant.

It just isn't gonna happen.

All speculation.

It's all we're left to do, unfortunately, at the moment.

And like you said, a lot of these answers aren't gonna reveal themselves potentially for years.

Yeah.

Nature's is in control right now.

And I have enjoyed watching I would say watching Ma Nature do her work.

I have loved this over the course of my career while I was living there and even now away from the canon looking at other things.

I love watching nature work.

It's beautiful thing to see even when it's scary and dynamic and even causes havoc.

It's like, wow.

There it is.

This is why our Earth looks like it looks because this natural force is in control, not us.

We can put up some barriers occasionally and maybe some piping and some cement might hold things together for a while, but nature will remove everything that we have done, completely remove it, and bury whatever's left of it under a lot of debris and thousands of feet of debris at some point in the in the course of this Earth, however long it lasts.

So we are not in control.

Just reminds us every now and then, you're right, that it's in control.

Yeah.

One one other thing I wanted to know, because this was was one of the most stunning aspects of this entire experience with Dragon Bravo.

And that is when we heard first early on, right after the lodge had burned, we started hearing that they were taking defensive measures, preventative measures at Roaring Springs, and we know how far down Roaring Springs is below the rim.

And to hear that was from a hiker's perspective, much less someone who lived there for decades like you did, That was staggering to hear.

And then we we kept hearing hearing it off and on for the next three or four weeks that they were still worried about Roaring Springs.

What were you thinking as you

were hearing that?

I wasn't in on any of those conversations and the decisions they made in relation to guarding Roaring Springs.

But I could imagine some of those conversations were based on, we can't lose this pump house.

We cannot lose this pump house.

I mean, this is the heartbeat of the water supply for Grand Canyon National Park as it is today.

We cannot lose this building.

We cannot allow a fire to sweep across the slope that comes from the base of the Muav limestone where the cave is, where the spring emerges.

That's a very plush slope.

It's shrouded with the spring is shrouded with cottonwoods and willows and and other riparian plant communities, and that whole slope has grass on it in the spring, and it's bright green.

We can't let any of that infrastructure burn.

The cave itself has infrastructure there, piping, a grill network, big big huge manual valves to be turned in there at times of the year.

None of that can be impacted by this fire, so they had to guard it for that reason and probably that reason alone, but also the residence, which is six tenths of a mile down the trail walking, but less than that as far as the crow flies is where the house is where we lived.

That building also probably was guarded or that's where a lot of guys were living probably in the house when they were guarding the pump house half a mile back up the trail.

So that infrastructure there is critical to the park operation.

The house, but the pump house really, that's key.

That's where the filtration goes on.

That's where the big heavy pumps are.

That's where the chlorination system is.

They're they're chlorinating the public water supply there.

All the readout equipment is there for chlorine residuals and turbidity among other things, pH readings.

All of that's going on inside that pump house.

It's an amazing operation at Roaring Springs.

It was a privilege for me to be there those years.

It it was absolutely a privilege.

Did you share the fears that they that they had when when I mean, did it seem remote to you that the fire could get all the way down there?

When you lived there, did you ever imagine that a fire could get down there?

Did it ever cross your mind?

No.

Never crossed my mind that a fire could get all the way down to Roaring Springs from a fire on the rim.

A fire on the rim, I never thought really would ever I could see it coming over the rim even down to the top of the Coconino sandstone because that forest that I was describing at the beginning of this conversation grows all the way to the top of the Coconino and even below the Coconino sandstone.

There are some chunks of that forest, but it turns to desert real quick, and there's not enough fuel, I don't think.

At least at that time, I sure didn't think that there would be a fire that would come from the rim, but a fire at Roaring Springs itself was quite possible.

And I was very concerned that that might happen, So I guarded every aspect of what we did at Roaring Springs to make sure that no that no small brushfires would occur that we caused or a hiker caused.

I warned hikers continually during the dry season about fire and the chances of of losing control of of what fires you may build.

Don't build them is what I would always say.

I can tell you when I first got there in 1972 and '73, there was another old guy that had been working at that pump house since 1949.

He retired, and I got the job in '73.

He retired at the '72.

I got the job in '73, right place at the right time.

That's a whole another story.

But when I got down to Roaring Springs, I was being shown some of the infrastructure there and a lot of the things by the guy that was training me, and he had been there since 1954, so he was full of information.

He told me that that former operator who had just retired used to burn the oily greasy rags from the pump house.

He had an old 55 gallon drum that sat out on the deck in front of the pump house, and this is the old 1928 pump house, and that's another story.

That pump house is no longer in existence.

He had an old 55 gallon drum, and he had punched holes in the sides of it to let air pass through, and he would just fill it up with old dirty greasy rags or any other trash he felt like burning from the pump house operation.

And believe me, there were a lot of greasy rags saturated in oil because those pumps leaked continually.

The old 1928 pumps leaked oil just continually.

He was lighting that the fire off in that can one day, and apparently, it was one of those windy days.

And I can assure you when the wind blows at Roaring Springs, it's like a Venturi.

It blows so hard it howls as it's moving up canyon.

And that wind blew a big chunk of burning rag out of that barrel, flew it across Roaring Springs Creek just on the other side and and hit that dry grass and brush on the other side and torched that whole slope all the way to the cave.

And it melted the Transcagian pipeline completely.

They had to relay all that pipe.

Wow.

But never any fires on your watch.

Oh, man.

I was not gonna let that happen on my watch.

I did not wanna leave that job.

I wanted to stay right there.

Did that cost him his job?

No.

He no.

He stayed.

Part It's different time,

wasn't it?

Different it was a different era, different People had different stories to tell, different access.

The leadership was different, and I heard a lot of stories.

That's just one of them.

Funny things went on at Roaring Springs and on the North Rim and along the trails, pre park service taking over all of that.

Park service took over the pump house, the pipeline, the power line, the residents at Roaring Springs.

The park service took took control of that in 1973, and that's when I assumed that position.

Previous to that, it had been the Utah Parks Company who was a subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad, and they ran the North Rim, and it was their pump house and their pipeline and their power line coming in and their residents.

And that guy who managed to have that small fire, he he worked for the Utah Parks Company, not the National Park Service.

So hence, probably the easy way he was dealt with under those circumstances.

Yeah.

Makes sense.

But that's what this other guy told me.

Oh, yeah, so and so, he caused that fire.

He used to burn rags in that barrel right there.

Probably didn't think anything of it.

No.

Well, and it belched out black smoke.

No.

Horrible.

When the fire was happening, and this is obviously a very long event, you know, it's not just you, obviously.

You're you're you raised a family down there.

And I'm sure your your kids, your family, everyone is still very connected to this place.

How are you all communicating about this as it was as it was happening?

We're all in acceptance mode now.

It was shocking at first as, of course, it would be for everybody.

Were you guys talking to each other as it was happening?

Of course.

What was going on with the conversations you were all having?

We were just it's like we were devastated just as much as anyone else, I would say.

But we also share a special relationship with that that nobody else has.

And when it came down to the inner discussions, maybe we were saying the home is wrecked, things like that.

Our home, it's never going to be the same again kind of a thing.

Will we ever even get to Roaring Springs again?

How what what are the circumstances going to be in the future?

All that speculation was there, but we are very aware of fire and the danger of fire, and it's not anything new to see a forest fire.

But this one was the big one.

And nobody expected this to happen in July 2025.

Who would, you know, be able to think that would happen?

But it did, and things happen, you know, and we accept that.

But we don't like it.

We're extremely sad.

We look at each other and go shrug our shoulders.

It's over.

That's all over.

It'll never be the same again.

We at least we have those memories of what it was like, and we know, and we hold those memories.

Do you need to get back down there again?

Is this something you need to do, or are you good?

Oh, I'm good.

I mean, if if if there was a way I could get back down there and and walk my little little pathways again and look at it again, I would do that, but I'm not invited, and most of that's off limits, and park service is having to do their work.

And I understand that.

And I don't live there anymore, and I'm no longer part of the the, you know, the system there.

But you're part of the legacy, and that's more important.

Yeah.

You know, somebody somebody said one time to me that we were in the rock layers.

I thought that was pretty cool.

I said, oh, I can accept that.

Yeah.

I like that.

We need a Nacon layer.

That's really nice.

Nacon limestone or something.

Yeah.

That's not gonna happen, but it might be deserved, though.

I don't know about that.

I didn't do anything.

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Well, it turns out Bruce Aiken isn't as willing to share the details of his time at Roaring Springs as you might like.

But that's only because he says he's trying to save the best stuff for his memoir, which he's hoping will be out within a year.

How do you go from New York to the bottom of the Grand Canyon?

I'm steeped in an art background.

Yeah.

My mother was a professional artist.

My father was was a theater guy.

And a TV producer.

TV.

He was all about art and music, and this is what I got from my dad.

Theater, production, advertising, all that kind of stuff.

My mom, I got the art, the painting, the visual world is ours that comes through our eyes into our creative core, and I grew up with that.

And and in the museums of New York and out to the beaches of Long Island and to the to the, you know, beautiful forests and woods around the city and back back to the city for the openings at the art galleries and theater, Broadway, Off Broadway.

We saw it all.

So my background is heavy in that, and I always knew that I was was going to be an artist of some kind, whether that was going to be an offshoot into music or whether it was going to be down the road with paint.

Something in there and in between that, knew it was going to be in the arts, plural.

I ended up at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan studying painting in the late nineteen sixties when everything that was going on then, and it was happening, and I was right there in the middle of it, and participated in much of it.

Late That is a whole another scene.

Yeah.

I bet.

Which I'm not will not open that when

But by this time by this time

I knew I was an artist.

And you'd already seen the canyon.

You saw it in, what, 1963, I think, the

first time.

When was a little kid.

No.

First time I saw it was 1954.

Oh, okay.

And my mom took us there with my grandparents.

And had you ever seen the West before?

It the first time seeing the West?

First time seeing

them.

And what do

you think?

Do you remember?

I was I thought I was in a Roy Rogers movie.

I loved it.

Theater immediately came to the forefront for me.

I loved that stuff.

I I thought this was hop along Cassidy.

I I thought I was gonna see the lone ranger at any minute.

All that kind of stuff was just fascinating for me, and and I I've always been an avid reader, and I've plowed through hundreds and hundreds of books in my life.

And as a kid, I was reading books, and my dad would pitch me books that he knew I would like.

Adventure is what always pulled my attention.

Adventure with real and true drama inside the adventure.

So I was already there, and and then I found myself at the school of visual arts in the late sixties, and I was studying painting with some of the best artists of that time.

I was fortunate to study three d design with the great Richard Serra.

My goodness.

He influenced me to use my creative core thoroughly and completely make it original from you and and go with your gut instincts, which I did.

By the time my school of visual arts, two years had gone by, and I suddenly realized that my painting was evolving, and I needed more, and the the scene in New York was going bad, the end of the that era, if you will, and and moving into the beginning of the seventies.

Not not good, at least for me.

And some of the things that were going on, I no longer wanted to participate in.

I decided to leave and go chase my dream of becoming a landscape painter in Arizona.

So it was a dream to come out west?

Absolutely.

Okay.

It was it was crafted.

This was a crafted plan to get to Arizona, and I just finished reading this book that had just come out called The Man Who Walked Through Time, Colin Fletcher.

Yeah.

The first man who had walked and wrote a book about his hike.

It was like from Supai all the way to Desert View.

Basically, he hiked on the Tonto Plateau, and he wrote this book and it became a bestseller.

And I said, this guy's all over it.

This is this is fabulous stuff.

I'm gonna do stuff like this and paint instead of write a book.

So I was getting ideas and so forth about this.

And how old are you at the time when you decided this?

This was in 1970 when you decided to

have lunch?

18 '19.

18 '19.

So how did your were your parents aligned?

Did they think this was a good idea?

They had already realized that I was already my own man, and I was already living in the city at that time, and on my own is what I'm saying, you know, and and I was crafting my own steps and they knew it, and they had both already given me all the rope I needed.

You know, they knew I was not going to be an engineer or a truck driver or a lawyer or or or definitely not gonna join the military, go to the Vietnam War.

They they knew all this stuff.

So Vietnam War was raging, by the way.

Raging.

So I wanted natural beauty, and I said, I gotta ditch New York.

I've gotta I've gotta ditch New York.

And the only thing I could think to do was get to Arizona, where I'd been twice, and was impacted heavily by what I'd seen.

And I came, and I arrived here in the 1970.

I think the last straw for New York was when the Kent State incident occurred in May 1970, and things were going nuts.

I did not wanna participate in the chaos that was emerging at that time, and I split, and I went to Arizona.

And I got here in the 1970, and it took me about a year and a half to realize I need to get to the Grand Canyon permanently.

I'd been up to the canyon and hiked several times.

December '70, I hiked to Phantom Camped down there, and met the folks that were working at the ranch, and I could see how they were living.

I said, these guys, they've got it dialed in.

This is a good thing right here.

And they were still living the lifestyle, that sixties lifestyle, if you will, without going into details.

They were living it at Phantom Ranch, and I said, this is gonna function for me.

I was living in Phoenix, taking just enough college credits at Phoenix College to keep my my deferment from the military.

That was key, so I wouldn't be drafted.

Finally, Nixon ended the draft, so that became a moot point.

And in late winter, 1972, made the move and loaded my motorcycle and straight for the Grand Canyon, and basically never looked back.

So when you headed up there, were you just going up there without a job and did Without

a job.

You're just gonna figure it out as you Raw.

Yeah.

But I was going there to stay.

No matter what.

No matter what.

Yeah.

There were some interludes because I'm not in control of everything.

So that's how I got to the Grand Canyon.

Then in 1972, 1972 is when the opportunity to join the trail maintenance team on the North Rim Yes.

Came.

Right?

So that was was that the first solid job that you had working at the canyon?

No.

The first solid job I had really was on a construction crew, but that's a whole another story.

The park service, that emerged, and I I was in the right place at the right time and took advantage of of of that moment that emerged for me.

To work on the trail crew?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I wasn't gonna let that pass.

I seized that moment, nailed down that job, and the thing started to unfold in front of my eyes like this magic Disneyland Fantasyland TV show opening up for me in front of my eyes.

It opened up.

It un unfolded the curtain peeled back, and the and the rest is history.

And this is all happening as you're working on the trail crew.

You're starting to see

Oh, yeah.

You're starting to see some opportunity.

Oh, yes.

Clearly.

Clear clear opportunities that I was recognizing, and some of them were pulsating.

And the most important one of those was when you saw this house down 44,000 feet below the below the North Rim, and you're wondering, what's going on with that?

Yeah.

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Well, if you've hiked rim to rim in recent years, you're no doubt familiar with the Manzanita Rest Area.

That's where you'll still find the old Aiken House sitting just above Bright Angel Creek.

With its proximity to the North Kaibab Trail, you can imagine that interactions with curious hikers were part of everyday life for Bruce and his family.

The knock on the door would come.

There it was the knock.

We knew the three questions were coming.

What are they?

You live here?

Yes.

Oh, don't you ever get bored?

No.

How do you get your groceries?

Yeah.

So we would say yes, no helicopter.

Yes, no helicopter.

That was it.

And the kids had the had the script as well?

Everybody knew that.

It was just an inside joke in the family.

That's all.

And we quickly learned.

And I'm talking about my interesting wife and myself, learned very quickly after we had arrived at that incredible house at Roaring Springs in 1973.

We learned quickly that the trail produced the most amazing things for us.

And that came in the form of human beings who were trying to have their Grand Canyon experience, whatever that may be.

We also learned very quickly that we became a place where hikers would knock on our door, want to know who we were, how did we get to live here, what are you doing, how long have you lived here, why do you live here, Do you own this?

All these questions would just rip out of one hiker after another.

But then we also learned that hikers were needy.

I'm gonna say right up front though that I would guess that the vast majority, probably more than ninety percent of hikers get out of the canyon on their own steam no matter what shape they're in.

Blisters, blown out knee, sick to the core I mean, throwing up, they get out of the canyon.

They manage to get out one way or another.

It might take them three times longer than they thought, but hikers are very, very determined people.

But I can tell you there are some that are ill prepared as we all well know.

We've all seen ill prepared hikers on the trail, and I've seen multitudes of them.

But most of the hikers that I've seen are very prepared, geared up, big smiles on their faces, and living their dream to get to the Grand Canyon finally.

And I can tell you that when the Iron Curtain fell, something we hadn't been paying attention too much, the news.

Looking back previous to nineteen eighty nine, ninety when the Iron Curtain fell, we had not met any hikers from, for example, Poland.

Lot of internationals coming down the trail though of other places like, oh, we met a lot of Italians, Brits, French people, lots of French hikers.

The French and the Italians, they're big hikers.

Swiss, Germans like crazy.

More Germans than you could shake a sick at.

Some Asians occasionally, but mostly Western European people who had fitness lifestyles.

And we met them all the time.

But even those sometimes would break down, and we'd have to rescue them.

They'd be a knock at the door, and in broken English, they'd be saying they need food, they're out of food, or they're in trouble, or this had happened, or, oh, the man would be there and my wife, if she can't take another step, what should we do?

You know, this kind of thing, and we would help them bring whoever the person was struggling.

We'd bring them to the house, sit them down on our front porch in the shade, beautiful shady porch, bring them a glass of cold water, lemonade, Gatorade, whatever it took to slowly bring them back.

But these were usually people from France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Great Britain, The Netherlands, sometimes Sweden, Norway, Denmark.

We saw these people a lot.

They were they were regular visitors to the canyon.

And Americans, lots of them from all over the country.

Many I would see again, and they come by and after their third visit, they go, oh, hi, Bruce.

They'd see me in the yard or something.

They knew who I was.

It was nice.

And some of the hikers we got to know, and they became our very good friends.

And we would even visit them in their homes.

Oh, wow.

We became that good of friends.

The trail delivered us wonderful people.

But after the fall of the Iron Curtain, I met my first person from Poland.

And I was like, wow.

No.

Wait a minute.

You're Polish.

I've never seen a Polish guy here before.

And then he would say, why do you think you never saw someone from Poland?

We were not allowed to leave, and now we are here.

And then I met my first person from Czechos Lovakia before the that country split apart into two different con countries, Czech and Slovakia.

And it was stunning to meet these people.

Met somebody from Romania.

I met a Russian finally.

I went, look at you at the Grand Canyon.

A Russian.

Come up to my porch.

I wanna have a conversation with you.

And I I got to meet people under these circumstances who had escaped or had actually earned their way to freedom or got out after the Iron Curtain fell.

And it was it was just a fabulous revelation to meet these people who had wanted to come to the Grand Canyon for their whole lives, and now finally, they are free, and now they are here.

They came in droves.

It was wonderful to see thou.

The whole world just came to your literally to your doorstep.

Well, they did.

The North Kaibab Trail.

I will never forget my my decades on the North Kaibab Trail and how wonderful it was for me and my family to get to know these international visitors the way we got to know them.

And the Americans, of course, many fabulous Americans and Canadians.

I felt like they were my community, the hikers.

And as I've said, many of them got to know me and knew my name and recognized me.

And no matter if I was on the South Rim doing business or up on the North Kaibab, you know, trying to hike out so I could drive to Flagstaff and shop for groceries and get art supplies, You know, you gotta remember, this is long before the days of the Internet and cell phones.

So it's pretty remote living at Roaring Springs in those days.

Yeah.

And you guys were at such a pivotal point in the trail too.

I'm sure that wasn't lost on you that, people hiking south to north, they get to your residence, which is now the Manzanita Rest Area, and that's what we always say, that's where the hike really begins Steep.

On the North Rim.

It gets really steep.

The switchbacks begin right there.

And people probably didn't realize that.

They don't let up except for that one flat stretch in the moo of limestone at the base of the Red Wall.

There's one nice long flat stretch.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then there were times, I know, that you and your family would spend a lot of time in the pool at Split Rock Falls.

Oh,

yeah.

And which is I mean, imagine having Split Rock Falls right around the corner from your house, which is what it literally was.

Did you guys name Split Rock Falls?

Is that why it's called Split Rock?

Yes.

You did?

Yes.

Wow.

I'm in the presence of of a legend, man.

I mean, holy cow.

You named Split Rock Falls, which is probably the most, well, easily the most photographed waterfall on the Rim To Rim route because everybody passes it, not everyone goes to Ribbon Falls.

So, Split Rock Falls, folks.

Bruce Aiken named it right there.

My kids played there.

Yeah.

We swam in that pool.

That pool formed right after the sixty six flood.

All those boulders moved in and that pool emerged.

So it was different before.

Yeah.

Was different before.

Yeah.

Didn't exist in that form.

All that debris got pushed in there, and when the water receded, that's how it ended up.

That pool though was so deep.

We guessed it was about 12 feet deep, and we could dive and jump off the big rock where the split was, and we could just jump right off there straight into that pool, and it was a playground of the first quarter.

And we showed it to all the hikers and everybody.

And and another thing, if if you could if you like to, you know, catch trout on on pole and line, you could go down there and then drop a lure into that pool Really?

Pull it through, and you would get a trout, like, right

No kidding.

Yeah.

Browns and rainbows ponded up there because they couldn't get over that falls.

Is it still like that today?

I'm sure.

Wow.

Never even crossed my mind.

Yeah.

Most people aren't aware of that, but it doesn't matter.

I mean, I know there's a controversy surrounding the trout because they aren't native.

A lot of that was seeded way a long time ago, and now they own the place.

And I know they've been removing non native fish, and that's underway.

So as an artist, your primary motivator for getting to the Grand Canyon was so that you could paint.

How in the world did you pick your scenes?

Because it was literally endless opportunity all around you.

Unlimited inspiration.

That's one of the reasons that the Grand Canyon resonated with me was because this place has more to offer than one man could possibly even remotely deal with in an entire lifetime.

I mean, I I clawed away at it for thirty five, forty years, you know, but there's so much left still that is worthy of oil paint for any artist to tackle.

But I have to say though that when I first got there, I didn't want anybody really to know that that's why I was coming to the canyon because I didn't want them to think I wasn't interested in the actual job.

Maybe I was kind of, you know, hiding the truth a little bit there, but I felt like I needed to because most of those people who worked around there on the North Rim at that time that I ended up working for were old school maintenance guys.

They were maintenance mechanics, very talented maintenance guys.

They could fix things, you know, and they knew how things operated, and they could drive heavy pieces of equipment, and they could do a lot of things that I could not do.

So I needed to learn a lot of that stuff from them.

So I carried with me a small backpack, a day pack with me everywhere I went.

And I said, oh, that's where I keep my lunch.

But it also had not just my lunch and water bottle, it also had a sketchbook, some drawing tools, and a 35 millimeter camera.

And I never let those tools get out of my grip everywhere we went.

And when I had a moment, I could, not surreptitiously, but, you know, sort of quietly pull the camera out and take a quick shot.

If we were in the middle of a job and taking a break, I would go use the camera quickly.

But as soon as it was my time, those eight hour days were over, then the sweet light of afternoon evening would emerge, and then I could get out there with the sketchbook and the camera both and start capturing things.

And one of the first things that I recognized was that this subject is more difficult than I ever ever imagined.

It is so complicated.

It still remains the most complicated landscape anybody could attach themselves to.

If you're an artist, I say go for it, but get ready for the struggle.

What makes it so?

When you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and look out there as a raw, uneducated human being for the first time, Say you're a truck driver from Cleveland, Ohio, and you and you've never thought once about geology or natural function of the earth or or or or geologic time or rock structure, and you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, you don't even know what you're looking at.

True.

You have no clue what it is you're even where does it begin?

Where does it end?

What's that thing?

That mountain sticking up?

How did that mountain come up in the middle of the Well, slowly you begin to learn why that so called mountain is standing alone in the middle of the Grand Canyon.

See that cap rock on top?

That rock used to connect all the way across and that's all that's left.

It's a remnant.

It's eroded away, and that's just an erosional feature.

And this takes time to even begin to understand this and and look out at the canyon and be able to connect the red wall limestone across a side canyon to the other side to where it connects there, and you then you can see how much has been removed.

Then you think about where did it go, and what was the the the the forces that took all this away?

This is what I grappled with for the first two, three, four years.

Nothing but geology, botany.

I had to know what I was looking at.

I did careful detailed paintings of plant communities, tree leaves, just leaves alone, flowers alone, just flowers trying to know and understand and learn the inner details of this incredible place, not just the big view.

The big view, of course, is what it is and shockingly difficult to tackle.

This is why you see a lot of paintings of the Grand Canyon with fog or a giant tree covering much of it, or it's 60% of it is sky and and 20% of it is canyon, and then the rest is foreground bushes and a giant tree.

This is the reason you see that because it's so difficult to tackle.

Wow.

It takes much, much study, practice, and learning.

Study, practice, learn more, discard your mistakes, start over again, learn the names of the formations, know them intimately, Be able to recognize the formations from anywhere you are in the park, North Rim, South Rim, East Rim, West Rim, on the river, on the trails.

Anywhere you are, look up and know what formation you're looking at.

These are the beginning tools for an artist to really come to grips with this incredibly complicated subject that you have chosen to tackle.

Good luck.

It took me from 1973, four, five, three years, nothing but that study.

I still have my old geology books, my botany books, my mineralogy books, my meteorology books.

I even wanted to understand the weather at the canyon and why certain things happen at the certain times of year.

Studied that heavily.

I kept weather records at Roaring Springs.

I built a weather station there like you see the professional ones.

I bought the the implements myself.

The I bought the the thermometers and the and and the hydrometers and all of those things.

I I installed them all in myself and kept my own records so that I could learn to begin to see patterns and anticipate what was going to happen next and why.

Wow.

And this is in the first three years.

I didn't paint at all.

It was too intimidating.

Preparation for three years

before you Yeah.

I was so intimidated.

Oh

my my gosh.

Gosh.

This is not New York, buddy.

This is the Grand Canyon now.

Wow.

I couldn't just go up up up to the gallery on 57 on 50 Second Street and and see what Frank Stella was doing and draw inspiration from his work.

Oh, no.

I was getting it now from nature.

And nature has a whole another set of rules, and it's more complicated than I ever imagined.

And I wrote in my sketchbook this phrase, the more I think I know, the less I realize I know.

Everything is more complicated than the last thing I just think I solved.

Boy, is that ever true.

So you never stopped learning then?

No.

Never stopped learning.

So you can can you ever even call yourself a master when it comes to the Grand Canyon?

That's somebody else's job to call somebody else that.

I don't know what I am.

All I know is what I did.

In the latter part of the seventies, the first paintings came.

Some were beginning to learn though and see what was happening.

They'd visit me at Roaring Springs, and they would see my paintings that were beginning to emerge starting in 1976.

TV shows happened in the mid seventies back to New York to appear on a TV show.

Newspaper articles came.

Reporters started to show up, and it evolved from there into what it was by the time I left Grand Canyon National Park.

National Public Radio pitched this idea to the park service to allow them to interview me live, and I would announce my leaving the canyon over the waves of NPR.

That actually happened.

I'll be darned.

Yes.

And from there, once I left then, more TV.

But in those other decades following the seventies, TV, media attention, art galleries, I was taking the artwork out, carrying paintings out on my back.

I modified a old camp trails or Kelty backpack frame, those old tubular aluminum frames, took the old pack bag off, chucked that, modified it with I built a little kind of a shelf on the back at the bottom of it where I could then wrap my paintings in plastic black plastic, tape it all up, duct tape, and then bungee it to the thing I built, wooden struts coming up to the top and off to the sides.

If it was a painting that was up to four and a half, five feet wide, I still had to carry those out This of the is how it was done.

And I would do that very, very early in the morning or late at night when the mule trains had already left because I did not want to approach a mule train Oh, yeah.

With that on the back.

There would be a rodeo Spook them in.

Right now.

So

Oh, man.

But still every hiker that you passed had to ask you, what what's going on here?

Yeah.

Eventually, though, they knew who it was.

Yeah.

That crazy guy at the bottom of the canyon carrying his paintings out of Yeah.

The

I saw you on TV last week.

Holy man.

Alright.

Great.

Wow.

So you've done all the TV.

You've got this incredible artwork that you've done.

I think you said over 300 pieces

Oh, yeah.

Ultimately.

Oh, yeah.

Amazing.

Closer to Between three fifty and four hundred.

And still painting to this very day?

Still painting today.

Yeah.

Showing me what you're doing today, which is incredible to just see your process and see what you see Thank you go through.

It's really, really neat.

Thank you.

But ultimately, Bruce, just with all this, with your legacy and everything that's happened, I mean, how how do you hope to be remembered?

I don't know.

I'm not really thinking much about that, and I'm let that be for the pundits to come up with.

I know that I'm not a perfect guy.

Nobody is.

I managed to do what I did.

I'm thankful for that.

So maybe that's what I should hopefully be remembered as, somebody that pulled something off that was pretty unique and was thankful for the opportunity.

And and I'm still alive here today to tell this story and write my memoir, which hopefully will be done within the next year.

You've only been teased here.

There's more.

Bruce Aiken.

There will certainly be a part two with him once his memoir is out.

He's still very active in the Grand Canyon community.

In fact, he was headed for the canyon the day after we spoke for an art event.

His prints, by the way, available at bruceaiken.com.

Bruceaiken.com.

And art is, of course, always more meaningful when you know the story behind the artist, as you now do.

Well, coach Arnie is an artist in his own right, and he's adjusting to all the trail closures and detours like the rest of us.

In fact, he's got a big hike planned in October with some Kenyan first timers.

So you know he'll be practicing what he preaches about the group mindset.

Lately, there have been a lot of questions.

There's been some some crazy stories that have happened with groups.

I've been on groups.

I've coached groups.

So I wanna share first a little bit about my background.

I'm a coach.

You know, I coach football and wrestling and all kind of sports, and I'm also an exercise physiologist.

But my coaching mindset has allowed me to help groups.

But I wanna go over with you some points that I have used when I coach groups, and maybe it will help you guys because groups are tough.

It's especially because most groups are families and friends.

And with families and friends, it gets very emotional.

So you gotta be very careful when you're in those kinds of groups because of the emotion involved.

But first of all, the first thing I look at is good planning.

So if your group is doing some good planning, you're in a good position, and you're probably gonna have a better adventure.

And then the next step is practice.

Are the members of the team practicing what the plan is all about?

And how do you know?

You have regular team meetings.

Anytime I've had an adventure in the Canyon especially, we have had regular team meetings to make sure that everybody is on the same page.

And are there any questions that could be answered months in advance rather than waiting a week in advance?

I mean, so you have regular team meetings.

The next point is contingencies.

What are some contingencies?

You know, we've developed contingencies for weather, for all kinds of things, injuries, what's gonna happen if something happens, and, you know, what are you gonna do?

You've gotta have these contingencies, these alternate plans that you can move and put into action very quickly.

And then big one a big one is who's the sheepdog?

And what is a sheepdog?

Well, a sheepdog is the one that protects the group, watches for, you know, predators, things that could harm the group.

You've gotta be on high alert.

A sheepdog has to be many times the most fit, the most healthy.

They have to be ready to go into action and help.

They have to guard the group.

So who's the sheepdog?

And then lastly, the last two points I always gotta throw in is you're gonna get your group a lot further along by loving and encouraging them.

And if you make it fun, you have a better chance of the group doing better.

So you gotta love and encourage, and you gotta make it fun.

Or why are you doing this?

Those are some of my points that I like to teach that I bring into my groups that I do, and it doesn't always happen that way.

But those are the things that we talk about.

I love you guys.

This is coach Arnie.

Have a great, great week, and I'll talk to you later.

Yeah.

You're only as strong as your weakest link when hiking in a group, so plan accordingly.

That's coach Arnie Arnie Foncica junior, our exercise physiologist and Kenyon coach.

His contact information is in the show notes.

If you need help or you just wanna talk about getting and staying healthy, coach Arnie is your guy.

Well, we can finally say that after being sold out for almost a year, our new day packs should be in stock in November.

Finally, that'll include our 22 liter one size rim to rim pack with our signature front strap pockets and insulated hydration compartment that keeps things cold.

And a new pack is coming as well, the 22 liter Canyon Elite, which will have the same features that make the rim to rim pack what it is, but we've added a hip belt as so many of you told us you wanted.

It will come in two sizes, that pack will, the Canyon Elite, so you can dial in the perfect fit.

The rim to rim pack and the Canyon Elite coming in November.

More details soon, including when we will start taking preorders.

As always, Zena and I are so grateful for your support.

You are the reason we do what we do from the show to our Facebook group to hiking.club and the Grand Canyon Shade Tracker.

It is all so you can have your best possible hiking experience.

Alright.

That's it for now.

My name is Brian Special encouraging you as always to go hike the canyon.

Take that first step.

Embrace the journey.

And when you get there, whether it's for time goals or taking your time, just hike your own hike and savor every step in the magnificent Grand Canyon.

We'll see you next time on the Grand Canyon Hiker Dude show powered by hiking.

Hiking plus kinship, that's hiking.

Join the movement in our Hikin' Grand Canyon Facebook group and at hikin'.club.

That's hikin.club.