I wasn’t made for Arizona. The humidity in Sedona and the Grand Canyon has been between 5% and 16% and it’s killing me. I’m a tropical country girl. I need more water in the air. I’ve been waking up with a bloody nose and chugging much more water than usual, which means I need to pee more than usual. I haven’t been sleeping well because I constantly wake up to pee. When I wake up, I’m really thirsty and my mouth is really dry, which means I have to chug more water, which means I’ll have to wake up to pee again in a few hours. And if I didn’t chug enough water, I wake up with a dehydration headache. There’s no way to win. There should be a law mandating humidifiers in all Airbnbs in Arizona.

Anyway, I arrived at the Grand Canyon on Friday afternoon. My plan was to try to walk 8 of the 13 miles of the South Rim Trail, which, as the name suggests, goes along the south rim of the canyon. There are shuttles that stop at multiple view points along the rim, so I was planning to hop on the shuttle if I got too tired and couldn’t walk the 8 miles. As I walked, I kept wondering how there could be such a big hole in the middle of the country. I later learned that we have the Colorado River to thank for that. It carved the canyon over millions of years in its quest to get to the ocean. It’s incredible to think that the Grand Canyon started out as a relatively flat plateau.

It turns out that I greatly underestimated the effects of the afternoon sun on a trail with no shade. After 2.5 miles, I stopped to ask myself why I was continuing to walk. I realized that the only reason was pride. I wanted to be able to say that I walked the 8 miles. I reminded myself that the point of this was to enjoy it and I really wasn’t enjoying it. I couldn’t even fully appreciate the views of the canyon because I could only think about putting one foot in front of the other in that heat. So I got on the shuttle.

At the next shuttle stop, the driver announced that the walk to the next viewpoint was on an unpaved 1 mi trail with amazing views of the Colorado River. Now he was speaking my language. Most of the trail is paved and I don’t know what it is about an unpaved trail that makes it more exciting, but it gave me the energy to walk that additional mile. There were, in fact, amazing views of the Colorado River. By the time I got to the next shuttle stop, the heat exhaustion had kicked in again, so I took the shuttle to the rest of the stops.

When I got back to my car, I realized that I was sunburned. I hadn’t gotten sunburned on this trip until now, which is impressive. My arms are actually tanned! This is new for me. I usually burn, peel, and then I’m white again. I guess that with all the time outdoors without sunscreen in the past few months, I got enough sunlight to tan over time, but not enough to burn. Surprisingly, I did put sunscreen on for the Grand Canyon, so the only conclusion is that the sunscreen caused me to burn. Just kidding, it was probably the fact that I walked a trail without any shade in the peak afternoon sun. Only my shoulders and legs are sunburned. Those weren’t tanned because they hadn’t gotten as much sun when I was hiking in cooler temperatures earlier in the year. You probably don’t care about any of this, but I need to document the results of my unintentional tanning experiment for future reference.

My plan was to wake up at 5 am this morning to hike into the canyon. It’s 5-10° hotter in the canyon than at the rim, so you have to hike early. However, everything that I mentioned in my rant in the first paragraph happened last night. By the time 5 am rolled around, I had a headache and hiking into a hot canyon with a headache seemed like a bad idea. So I slept until 6:30 am and went to the park after breakfast. Weather-wise, I could have still hiked when I got to the park, but I still had a tiny headache. At 10 am I felt great and ready to hike, but it was too late to start at that point. Like Sedona, I need to come back to the Grand Canyon when it’s cooler, since we’ve established that 5 am wake-ups are not my thing. I’ll have to remember to pack a humidifier.

Instead of hiking, I saw the 7 miles of the south rim that I hadn’t seen the day before. I took the shuttle to all the stops today. At one of the stops, I saw the great-great-great-(496 more “great”)-great grandson of the squirrel from the movie Ice Age.

After seeing the rest of the rim, I went back to my Airbnb to watch another depressing Ecuador vs Curaçao soccer game. Now I’m going to chug water before bed so I’ll wake up 20 times to pee but can hopefully avoid a headache. Tomorrow I’m heading to Durango, Colorado.