Grand Canyon (Mis)Adventure
From a young age, I have always enjoyed spending time outdoors, hiking, camping, canoeing, riding my bike, etc. As an adult, I’ve chosen more adventurous treks, including hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2001 and cycling cross country in 2018, both taken on along with my husband, Jon.
In 2021, Jon decided that he wanted to do the Tour Divide, a self-supported bike race that runs between Antelope Wells, New Mexico and Banff, Canada and starts on the second Friday in June. The 2,700-mile route follows back roads, gravel roads, single-track mountain bike trails and everything in between. This was not something I was keen to tackle myself, but I was more than happy to support him in this endeavor.
He anticipated that this would take him approximately three to four weeks, so we set out a plan for me to drop him off at the southern border, and I’d generally parallel his progress north. I plotted out a road trip that would first take me to the Grand Canyon, then over to Colorado, up to Wyoming and Montana and finally to Banff, stopping to see various sights and visit friends and family along the way. I had camping, hiking, and biking gear and was excited for the trip. I had never been to the Grand Canyon, but I had heard many stories from my mother who had gone to horse camp in Arizona as a kid. Always looking for a challenge, I honed in on doing a one-day Rim-to-Rim hike, North to South.
After dropping off my husband to start his ride, I made my way to the North Rim. I walked around the Rim, checked out the parking area where I would start the next day, then headed out to find a back road and a dispersed camping site (a free, primitive camping area on public lands). I slept fitfully, anticipating the big day ahead. I was up early and hit the North Kaibab Trail at 4 a.m. on June 12, my sister’s birthday. The temperature was 45 degrees.
There was a group of six or seven hikers/runners who took off just ahead of me. During the next six hours, I descended 5,800 feet into “the box,” the hottest part of the canyon. The advice is to avoid this four-mile section between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. I reached the box at 9:30 a.m. and crossed the Colorado River at 10:45 a.m. It was already 90 degrees. Fifteen and a half miles down, eight to go, all up, on the steep and winding Bright Angel trail. The temperatures were heating up, and I was drinking plenty of water. I’d followed the advice I’d read ahead of time to bring salty snacks and electrolyte drinks. As it got warmer and warmer, my appetite waned, and I wasn’t eating as I should have. I later realized that the electrolyte mix I had brought didn’t actually have a lot of sodium, only 110 mg. per packet. General guidelines are to have between 500 and 1000 mg. per hour if exercising in the heat. I took breaks on the way up at Indian Gardens, 3-Mile Rest House, and 1.5-Mile Rest House, soaking my head in cool water, dousing my shirt, and using a cooling neck towel I’d brought.
I saw the group that had started just before me at Indian Gardens; they gave me high fives for making it there at a good pace. (One member of their group had twisted her ankle and was going to stay down there that night). By the time I got to the 1.5 Mile Rest House, I was cooked but still moving. Just after leaving there, I vomited, mostly water, as I hadn’t been eating much. I rested for a while, then set off again to finish this thing! The last picture I took was at 4:37 p.m., 1.1 miles from the South Rim and my overnight destination at El Tovar hotel, where my mother had stayed with her parents when she visited the Grand Canyon as a child.
I woke up two days later at Flagstaff hospital in the ICU.
Apparently, I had been found unconscious on a road on the South Rim. When I later retrieved my Garmin watch and phone, I determined that, after I got to the trailhead, I proceeded to walk right past El Tovar and walked incoherently for another eight miles over the course of three hours, eventually collapsing on the Entrance Road. I don’t remember anything beyond that last picture I took. Someone saw me and called emergency services. When they checked my sodium, they found it was “critically low” (below 100). They pushed a bolus of sodium, apparently more than my system could handle. My heart rate went to 20; I was given IV epinephrine. They transported me to the Grand Canyon airport, and they helicoptered me to the Flagstaff hospital. I was taken to the ICU where the doctors decided to slowly raise my sodium levels. I was sedated and intubated, as I apparently had become combative. The next day, they removed the tube, kept me in ICU for a few more hours, then moved me to a regular room for another day, monitoring my blood pressure, which had been elevated during my stay.
Meanwhile, one state over in Silver City, New Mexico, my husband had had his own struggles with the heat on his ride. He’d had trouble breathing in the heat and had fallen off his bike on a descent. He’d gotten a ride to an Urgent Care and was diagnosed with pulmonary edema. He had tried to contact me using “Find my Phone” and figured I must have decided to stay in the lower part of the canyon. When he couldn’t contact me the next day, he started calling around the various services at the Grand Canyon. He eventually talked to someone at El Tovar who told him I had not shown up, but they told him that they had a message for him to call Emergency Services. He eventually talked to the ICU nurse, who told him I was doing well and that I was intubated mainly as a precaution and was responding well to the treatment. He eventually got a ride to Flagstaff from one of my cousins who lived in Phoenix. (A whole other story in and of itself!)
Needless to say, we gave up on our intended adventures and made our way to family in Wyoming and recovered there. I was instructed to follow up with my doctor on sodium levels, blood pressure, and rhabdomyolysis, a condition that occurs when muscle tissue breaks down and releases harmful substances into the bloodstream. Thankfully, there have been no long-term effects of my exercise-induced hyponatremia.
My husband and I had a Facebook group to chronicle our individual journeys, and we updated our friends on our misadventures, so of course, my optometry family heard about it. One of my first-year professors at the college was Vondolee Delgado-Nixon, PhD, who taught us ocular physiology. She and I became friends through the years, and she had heard about the “Grand Canyon episode.” We talked all about it, and she later mentioned that she uses the example in her lectures to help students understand fluid movement in the body and the ocular tissues. (“I have a former student who …”) Cellular fluid exchange is a delicate balance that can be influenced by a number of factors, resulting in hyper or hyponatremia. Medical conditions such as heart failure, kidney disease, liver disease, and adrenal gland disorders can disrupt the body’s fluid and electrolyte balance as can numerous medications. Specific medications that contribute to hyponatremia include diuretics, antidepressants, antiepileptics, antihypertensive agents, antibiotics, and proton pump inhibitors. In this case however, it was exercise induced, combined with heat, insufficient sodium intake, and excessive water intake.
While I was dismayed to become a poster child for how not to hike the Grand Canyon, I also realized how extraordinary and vulnerable the human body is. The delicate balance of sodium and water that keeps our cells functioning, our nerves firing, and our muscles contracting can shift in hours under the stress of heat, exertion, and hydration gone wrong. My experience became more than a cautionary tale. It became a living lesson in homeostasis, fluid dynamics, and the resilience of the body’s regulatory systems. Science is not just something we study in a lab, classroom or textbook, it’s happening within us every moment, one ion exchange at a time.
