The forecast high for Phantom Ranch for this day was only in the upper 70s!!!  Perfect time for a day hike down to the river and back.  I was up at 3:30 a.m. and hiking down the South Kaibab at 7:30 a.m.  Over the course of the day I saw maybe fifty others on the trail.  I cached a liter of water atop the Redwall at 9 a.m.  It was very clear most of the day, with more clouds in the afternoon.  But very windy, with especially high gusts along exposed  sections of the trail.  But, nice cool temperatures.  Even down in the schist, when there wasn’t much of a breeze, it was very comfortable.  I came back up a different route and reached the junction of the Tonto Trail with the South Kaibab Trail at 3:30 p.m.  It took me an hour to get to Skeleton Point.  After a twenty minute break I took another hour to hike up to Cedar Ridge.  From here I could see that there was a fire on the north rim, with smoke shrouding the upper reaches of Bright Angel Canyon.  After a fifteen minute break here I was on my final leg of this 15 mile day.  It took me another hour to reach the rim at 7 p.m.  The switchbacks in the Kaibab limestone were absolutely chilly!  This is June?  From here I had to walk to the nearby picnic area where I parked.  Forty minutes after topping out of the canyon I was on my way back home to Flagstaff.

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     So reads my post in Facebook.  And, what was that "different route?"  A couple of people asked about it.  It was the old Wash Henry Trail.  Most hikers refer to it as the "Old Miner's Trail" but that is because when it was rediscovered in the 1960s apparently nobody had a clue about its origins.  As it turns out, it shows up as a trail on the first maps published by the U.S.G.S. as a result of the canyon surveys done by Francois Matthes from 1902 to 1904.  It isn't labeled, but the trail shown on the map is this exact one.  I was able to get a copy of Matthes' field journals and in them he describes going down this trail and he calls it the Wash Henry.  So, now we have a name.  Actually, there will still be some confusion on this point.  This trail was used to reach the river and then you'd need a boat to cross over to the other side.  Later, David Rust built a cable car across the river to facilitate this process.  But, this wasn't going to be easy to do where the Wash Henry was located.  Instead, Rust built his crossing where the current black bridge is, with nice solid cliffs flanking the river and suitable for anchoring the cable.  Well, a "new" trail was built down to this crossing and it has also been referred to as the Wash Henry.  So, that would make the trail I am using this day the "old" Wash Henry.  That newer trail, of course, has been supplanted by the current South Kaibab Trail.  [To add to this confusion, apparently, the trail that led out of Bright Angel Canyon and onto the North Rim was also called Wash Henry.  This all begs the question, "Who was Wash Henry?"  I don't think anyone knows!!]  The 1915 quadrangle map shown to the right has both the old trail (yellow arrows) and the newer trail to the cable crossing (blue arrows).
     I first hiked up this trail in 1981 and have now been up six times (but, never down it!) and it is mostly in really good shape.  There have been a few times when I was confounded about getting onto the trail at the bottom.  For this hike I decided to take many, many, many photos of the trail as I climbed up in order to better document its route.  Most often I would take two pictures each time I stopped - one looking down and one looking up.  Altogether I have assembled over 80 pictures.  I annotated them with arrows to show the trail and its direction from my POV.  All of the photos below are hyperlinked to larger images.  If you would like to see the larger photo without the annotation, they are linked to the time notation included in each caption.  I put those times in to get a better sense for how far apart certain locations are, but since I was often stopping to take pictures, note that my time was rather slow.
     I have also broken up the presentation into three segments - from the River Trail to the low saddle; from the low saddle to the high saddle; and from the high saddle to the Tonto Trail.  The first segment is the most problematic.  While the route is in good shape, there are a lot of loose rocks, and knocking any loose would almost certainly mean they would fall all the way down onto the River Trail where you began the assent.  So, taking care is important.  Indeed, any rocks knocked off above the low saddle and below the high saddle may have a good probability of landing/hitting the River Trail between the two bridges!

Click on any picture to see a larger image.

From the low saddle to the high saddle

At the saddle - selfie to the east.
1:58

At the saddle - selfie to the north.
1:58

Excerpt from Matthes' journal:

Saturday, November 7, 1903
   Broke camp and packed up to Pipe Cr. – Suzie falls and has to be led without pack over the worst place.  Picky falls about a hundred feet with the mess boxes.  She has one eye knocked out, and remains in dazed condition.  Philips drives her down to river.  Perky has bad fall, smashing remaining mess-box.

Sunday, November 8, 1903
   Sent Johnson, Evans and Philips down to the river for rest of supplies and had camp moved to Indian Gardens in afternoon.

Click on any picture to see a larger image.

From the high saddle to the Tonto Trail