The Under Review - Issue 4 | Summer 2021

60
When I was planning my trip, I briefly toyed with riding a mule down to the river and back. In addition to a
fear of heights, I’m a bit of a nervous passenger. As a passenger in a car, I “steer” with my knees, twisting to
the right when the driver gets too close to the center line and to the left when too close to the shoulder. I
slam on the brakes constantly and then attempt to cover the action with a pretended stretch. Most drivers
eventually ask me to sit in the back, so they don’t have to witness my tortured movements.
I’m bad enough with friends, so the idea of handing control over to a mule didn’t sit well with me.
Everything I read, however, said they were safe. And I’m guessing they have more sense than most hikers.
So it wasn’t their abilities I doubted, as much as I feared getting the one suicidal mule in the bunch.
Down the trail, up the trail. Day after day after day. Carrying stupid tourists. Then standing before the
mule is me: his next tourist, a six-foot tall, 200-pound man (maybe just a tad more than 200 pounds).
Rather than just walk off the job, suppose my mule decides to take us both out in a blaze of glory. I don’t
know that I could blame him.
In the end I decided I was being foolish if for no other reason than the outfitter’s business model requires a
strong safety record. Siding with reason rather than my fears, I started to book a mule trip down the
canyon. Started. I didn’t finish the reservation because there was one little problem.
I was over the weight limit. Too fat to ride a mule.
At least my humiliation was conducted privately before a computer screen, rather than at the canyon atop
a knee buckling mule. It did make me wonder, though, how many people make reservations according to
the weight listed on their driver’s license. Or does the fear of being asked in front of everyone to get off a
mule override the instinct to lie about our weight?
Perhaps I should have mastered walking along the Rim Trail without fear before trying other trails, but
even for me that felt like too much of a baby step. For my second hike, I had settled on the Bright Angel
trail, a mere stone’s throw from my cabin on the south rim of the canyon. I had read up on the trail and
thought a three-mile hike down to the rest house would be a good first challenge with its well-maintained
trail, tunnels, and switchbacks. The first two tenths of a mile of the trail were described as “not too steep.”
Once on the Bright Angel trail, I quickly realized the brochure and I had vastly different definitions of
steep, not to mention what the brochure left out. Flattened against the wall of the canyon, pretending like
I was taking pictures, but in fact too petrified to move, it was not the pitch of the trail I cared about. It was
THE UNDER REVIEW