INTO THE VOID

Wildly fluctuating temperatures, punishing grades, brushes with mountain lions—the Grand Canyon’s Rim to Rim to Rim endurance run is not for the faint of heart.

- BY DUNCAN CRAIG

"IT'S A DOOZY ALL RIGHT," says the receptionist, fixing her eyes on the snowstorm battering the hotel window. “We've had guests calling all afternoon saying the interstate has been shut. Some may end up having to sleep in their cars.”

This explains the Shining-like dearth of guests here at The Grand Hotel in Tusayan, Arizona—the gateway town for the Grand Canyon. A huge fire blazes in the lobby's fireplace, casting a welcoming glow on the oversize sofas and wall-mounted moose and elk heads. There’s coffee on tap, a hot tub in the spa, and an onsite saloon and steak house in which to linger.

It’s the perfect place to lie low until the storm passes. The only problem is, in just a few hours, I must pry myself away from this timber-clad sanctuary to tackle one of the world’s most spectacular and challenging endurance runs.

Rim to Rim to Rim (known in ultra circles as R2R2R or R3) is borderline barbaric, even in benign conditions. The challenge has a childlike simplicity to it: I wonder how long it would take to run to there and back. “There” is the opposite rim of a canyon so vast you could spend decades scouring its depths: about 278 miles long, 18 miles across at its widest, and plummeting a rusty-red, strata-laced vertical mile.

As I’m shortly to discover, you can be shivering in subzero temps on the rim in thick snow and, only a few hours later, parched and sweat-encrusted on the canyon floor, nervously taking mental stock of your electrolyte supply. The wildly fluctuating temperatures are just one of the challenges of the R3. The 43-mile total distance is another—laced with head-spinning “vert.” Make it back to your starting point on whichever rim you began, and you'll have clocked some 11,443 feet up and the same down.