(Mostly) off-topic: Bucket List

I apologize for the long post.  For those who are busy, here is a summary.  Last week I hiked Grand Canyon from rim-to-rim-to-rim and I am proud of myself.  You can skip the rest.

When I was in my late 50's, I would visit the Grand Canyon, stand on the rim, and say to myself. “I wish I had hiked down to the river when I was 21 and it was not a big deal.”  But after a while, I asked myself, “why not now?”

So slightly before my cancer diagnosis, I started hiking to the river and back in a day.  It is about a sixteen mile hike with one mile loss (and regain) in altitude.  The first time I did it, I thought I might die on the trail.  But with each successive hike, it got easier.

My chemo was two-weeks-on, one-week-off.  At the end of every off-week (except one), I would travel to Grand Canyon and make the hike to the river and back.  Those trips were a relief for me.  When hiking, all I could think about was hiking.  I could not think about cancer.  All I could think about was the progress on the trail, and when I finished, I got a rare sound sleep.  After completing chemo, I kept going to the Canyon way more than I could justify or afford.  But it simply felt good to me.

Of course, over time hiking to the river and back became less satisfying, so I set a goal of hiking from rim-to-rim in a day.  That’s only seven miles as the bird flies, but about 24 map miles on the trail.  Twice last Summer I set up the rim-to-rim hike, but failed.  The first time the guy I was going to hike with fell ill and we cancelled without starting.  The second time, rodents got into the trail food in a North Rim cabin, and with no way to replace the food at 3:00am, another hike was cancelled.

Last week, I made the hike from South Rim to North Rim, and after staying on the North Rim, back again.  So I have completed my bucket list trip of rim-to-rim-to-rim.  The map distance is about 24 miles, but the fitness tracker logged it as about 30 miles each way.  The hike entails getting up at about 1:30am, hitting the trail at 3:00am, and for me took a bit more than 12 hours one way and almost 13 hours on the way back.

I am a painfully slow downhill hiker, due in large part to the damage chemo did to my back and joints.  If you add-up the sum of my physical challenges, I could claim to be disabled.  In fact, last Fall I obtained a handicapped parking placard.  I do not use it, but somehow getting it was important to me, it is a sort of blue badge of courage.

I asked myself what is the purpose of this post?  To some degree, I guess I am just bragging.  But to another degree I want people who face the uncertainty that I did when I was diagnosed to realize that there is the potential to resume a relatively normal life.  To a natural degree, people come to this forum when things are not going well and walk away when things get better.  Sometimes that skews the picture of what colorectal cancer is like.  We all have to make adjustments to deal with the surgery and recovery.  Most all of us pay a price for having chemo.  Most all of us face a reduced potential life-span and have to make peace with mortality.  But nonetheless, we can also accomplish goals and tick boxes off our bucket list.

A final observation.  I have noticed that members who have a passion, be it a horse, a dog or cat, a kayak, a grandchild, a mountain home or a desert canyon, seem to have more peace in their lives.  Hiking Grand Canyon is a bit of an obsession for me, but it has given me a great degree of peace, especially after my cancer diagnosis, plus it gives me a good dose of exercise that I think helps my health.  I'll close with one of my many sayings, "Aging (and I include cancer in the aging category) isn't fun, but it beats being dead."