On the trail at 5:15 AM. Really nice moonlight. Too flat for me to see all the water bars and big rocks, but I had a nice view of the Canyon for a change. Light enough to see to walk out without lights once we turned around at Mile and a Half.

Normally this time of day one is alone on the trail except for the occasional predator in hiding. Today we met a couple dozen people who did not look like the typical rim to rim runners (IE, half naked, one water bottle and a big stopwatch), so I don't know what was going on.

We have decided what it is about rim to rim runners that bugs us. It is not hiking fast, because we do that when we are by ourselves. It is not being competitive, because we have both been known to increase our speed when we are being overtaken by snot-nosed kids (not to be confused with nice kids, who are allowed to overtake us if they can do so). This May, on the first weekend the North Rim was open, I was in the North Rim Lodge looking out the windows. Two runners were telling all and sundry that they had finished their rim to rim in eleven hours.

"So, it takes about 12 hours to go rim to rim?" one of the women in my group asked.

"Eleven, eleven!", they corrected her testily.

"But we are taking five days to do a rim to rim," she said,

"Well, I don't know what in the world you're going to do down there for five days!"

And there you have it. If anyone who has been down in the Canyon does not think it would be nice to go back and spend more time sitting under waterfalls or napping under the cottonwoods or drinking lemonade at the Canteen, they are not my kind of people. They can keep their eleven hours.