Dreams, Moments, Travels
Friend, inspiration, and mentor Lani Randall of Rocking Horse Jewelry passed away today after a long battle with cancer. Lani is the lady that made Caroline’s and my wedding rings. Over the years we helped Lani with her website and in return, she lavished us with gifts, from handmade Buffalo moccasins and jewelry for Caroline to a Navajo drum for me. Lani will forever be in our hearts.
[Note: this post wasn’t put together until February 2022 and was not based on notes; it was taken out of memory.]
For the past two months, I’ve been driving my mother-in-law Jutta Engelhardt mad as we went hiking, visited the gym, got her on a bike, had her volunteering at Tonopah Rob’s farm with me, and generally kept her ridiculously busy. Over that time, I never let on why I was pushing her nearly every day to keep moving, but that reason is being shared with her right now. We are hiking her into the Grand Canyon.
In all her visits to the canyon, of which there are many, we never attempted to hike her into this place as we never felt her health and stamina were up to the task.
So here she is at 73 years old, more than ten years since that first visit back in 1997, and I’m confident she’ll do just fine.
Her enthusiasm is great, and she’s excited by the prospect of going on such a hike, though she’s also a bit nervous about “How we’ll get this old lady out of the canyon.”
My memory is fuzzy, but I don’t believe I’d be exaggerating if I claimed that Jutta told us 100 times this day how appreciative she was for not only bringing her here but believing she’d be able to do such an extraordinary thing.
Down we went, ensuring she remained sure-footed and relying on the walking sticks. If she fell down along the way, it wouldn’t have been the first time while visiting us in America, but all the training in the gym we’d done in those previous 60 days was to avoid such a potentially scary situation.
While the ladies made their way down to where these mules were tied up, I raced down to snap a few photos.
And when I rejoined Caroline and Jutta I was able to grab a couple more images of the mules on their way back to the rim after their break.
As for us…
…we’ve reached the halfway point at Cedar Ridge. Now that the easy stuff is out of the way, time to get serious.
But not before admiring the canyon for another moment as we had lunch, visited the toilet hut, and smiled at each other a lot.
Now, Jutta’s endurance is about to be seriously challenged.
Notice that she’s still smiling.
We stopped frequently with Jutta, apologizing that she was slowing us down. Of course, we reassured her that we were here JUST for her, and this was all about her accomplishing a hike in the Grand Canyon in her 70s. This was worth every second we were spending with her here.
We did have a bit of a scare towards the end of the hike as snow flurries were dusting the area, and it felt like we were losing light, but we just kept on going forward.
After 8 hours out here hiking the 2.8-mile roundtrip trail to Cedar Ridge, we were done, and the smile should tell you everything.
We celebrated this grand accomplishment in the Grand Canyon with our favorite hot chocolate on earth at El Tovar. Here’s to winning!
We’re driving home tonight as this milestone in Jutta’s life has been achieved, and there is nothing left to do here except start bragging.
This is epic Grand Canyon hiker Laurent “Maverick” Gaudreau. We met him on the bus out to the South Kaibab Trailhead. We learned of his incredible feat of hiking rim-to-rim 100 times just the year before during his 80th year. Not a year after I took this photo, he would take his wife’s and his life.
[Note: this post wasn’t put together until February 2022 and was not based on notes, purely taken out of memory.]
We didn’t get out of Phoenix very early, as the time stamp on these old images showed us reaching this meadow near Flagstaff around 1:00 in the afternoon. With the Grand Canyon National Park so close to us, we have the luxury of late-day departures and still arriving at the canyon in time for sunset.
That’s Lookout Studio, designed by the inimitable Mary Jane Colter, meaning the building on the left, not the giant canyon in the background.
It’s too late to get very far down the Bright Angel Trail, but that’s okay, as sunset and dinner await us.
By this time, I was sitting on my hands in excitement as on this visit to the Grand Canyon, something extraordinary was in order, but Jutta wasn’t going to learn about it until the next day.
That smile tells me everything and in this instance, it says, “Thanks John and Caroline for these amazing things I’m able to do in America, I could have never dreamed of times like this.”
A beautiful mare with her new foal shows us what happiness is.
Celia here at Chile Acres got Caroline and her mom back on the horses today to add a bit more familiarity while my mother-in-law is still visiting us. She and Jimmy also invited the three of us into their home for lunch.
She’s a good sport.
With that weekend in Los Angeles, Jutta lost some time at the loom and maybe didn’t make as much progress on her Navajo weaving skills as hoped for but things are still looking good for completion in the next 20 days.
Breakfast was apparently from somewhere forgettable as there are no photos of the place or an inspired dish one of us had, but who cares as we head down the road from our motel for a brief visit to the ocean.
With the eyes feasting on these sights, who needs food? Right, John, anyone who knows you is aware that the culinary delights are equally important to your sense of creating a perfect trip, so don’t even try intimating you know how to satisfy yourself with beauty alone.
Smelling the sea air, listening to the crashing waves, and feeling the marine weather before returning to the desert is an elixir that makes the sterile environment of Phoenix, Arizona, tolerable. One of the major benefits of living as far away from the coast as we do is that it’s impossible to take what California offers for granted, as so many Californians do. Of course, they deal day in and day out with traffic that would make anyone resent moving across the L.A. basin.
We visitors, on the other hand, can afford to marvel at the simple pleasures like witnessing a bunch of fishing poles cast off the pier, awaiting a fish to take the bait.
It must be Sunday because we are at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market; if it were Saturday, we’d be at the Arizona Avenue Market in Santa Monica, although Tonopah Rob’s Vegetable Farm has certainly diminished our need to drive all the way to California to get great veggies.
Not buying any music today, but parking in the area when the market is going on isn’t easy so we had to park a couple of blocks away. From here we have to point the car east and just keep on going for nearly 400 miles until we reach home again.