The North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park is out of the way.
Six hours from Salt Lake, four-and-a-half from Las Vegas and nearly three-and-a-half from Flagstaff, only a small fraction of the millions of visitors who flock to the park each year make the detour.
But the area has a powerful hold on those who love it.
Just before 6 in the morning on opening day, nearly a dozen vehicles line up outside the park's gate.
Just inside the park, a small crowd of rangers and Superintendent Ed Keable count down the seconds.
“Oh, it’s 6 o’clock,” says U.S. Park Ranger Tim Hopp, unlocking the gate.
“All right, you guys going to swing it?” Keable asks.
The group pushes the gate to the side as its metal screech cuts through the morning air.
Visitors cheer from their vehicles as the first few cars begin rolling through the gate.
Just eight months ago, the Dragon Bravo Fire swept through the North Rim, passing just to the east of the entrance station.
The forest along State Route 67 and the entrance station is now a mosaic of charred and green trees.
An hour later, musician Chip Broyles, with shoulder-length white hair and flip-flops, stares past a chain-link fence that bisects Bright Angel Peninsula.
About 50 yards away sit the ruins of the 100-year-old Grand Canyon Lodge.
“I wanted to see this as soon as it was happening. I wanted to come up while it was still here,” Broyles says. “I’m surprised how much of the foundation of the building is gone, but it’s just, it’s devastating.”
Broyles says he’s been searching out every photo he can of the lodge since it was destroyed by the Dragon Bravo Fire last year, but seeing it in person is different.
In 1996, he and his brother set out from Nashville, where he had a career in country music, to visit their cousin who worked at the lodge.
“I came out here to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and had a spiritual experience. And I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to leave Nashville, I’m going to move to the Grand Canyon, I'm going to live in a little log cabin and I’m going to write songs,” Broyles says.
Broyles drove the laundry truck for the lodge before becoming human resources director for the concessionaire and a river guide for Western River Expeditions.
He says he’d sometimes set up his cot in the lodge’s famous sun room where three large windows once held a panoramic view of the canyon.
Today, only the bottom ledge of the sun room's windows remain.
Broken glass is still scattered across it.
About a year before Dragon Bravo he, his brother and several old friends who worked at the North Rim made one last trip to the lodge.
“A bunch of dudes got together that used to work here, and we got to see the lodge one last time. My brother Rick and I stayed up until about 4 in the morning, lay on the floor of the sunroom. And I said, ‘Every single song we ever wrote — every single song — I played in this room, you know?’ And I was so grateful I took the time to do that because it was just a short while later that it burned down,” Broyles says, holding back tears.
Those quiet moments also live on in the mind of Grand Canyon park ranger Tim Hopp.
He spent seven years living and working year-round on the North Rim.
“You can find solitude, and that’s what I liked about it,” Hopp says.
Hopp quietly takes in the low limestone walls of the lodge and cottage standing just as it did before the blaze.
“I do remember going to the cabin in front of me and going onto the porch, sitting on one of the rocking chairs and reading Lord of the Rings or other novels and then gazing into the canyon,” Hopp says.
That awe-inspiring landscape is what’s drawn Jeff Spencer to return countless times to climb the 5,000-foot slopes.
Now he sits on a rock at the North Kaibab Trailhead; gray hair pokes past a sun visor that reads ‘I heart trails,’ and texts his wife that he has made it to the North Rim.
Hiking from rim-to-rim is a bucket list item for many. Spencer is hiking it as an out-and-back, rim-to-rim-to-im.
“Or the double crossing of the big ditch. That’s why I’m so thankful they’ve opened up the rim because this is my 10th R-3,” Spencer says.
He’s done 100-mile marathons and Ironman competitions, but he says nothing compares to hiking the canyon.
He did it twice last year alone.
And when Spencer learned the North Kaibab Trail would reopen, he knew he had to be one of the first people to set foot on it.
“It was so important because as you get older, we can't outrun the clock,” Spence says, becoming emotional. “So, there's not going to be very many …”
He stops to collect himself.
“It also, it makes me feel very small. I’ve got an ego, and it's pretty big sometimes, and this makes me feel real small, and as a Christian, it makes me feel like God is just so big here,” Spencer says. “It humbles me.”
Minutes later, Spencer sets out into the canyon, past the charred ponderosa that still cast shade over the trail.
