Our second day at the Grand Canyon started early. If there’s one thing I got better at on this trip, it was getting up early. (Actually, it was probably endurance hiking.) But we were in the car heading to watch the sunrise from Point Imperial within minutes after our 5:15 alarm. The cold was extreme, and we were both wearing every layer we had brought.

Point Imperial is the highest point on the North Rim, and we were joined there by two other extremely intense photographers to catch the sun’s first rays.

Though we had planned to make coffee at Point Imperial and enjoy the sunrise, our lighter’s premature demise prevented us from doing so, so we hightailed it back to the North Rim to visit the Rough Rider Saloon, which starts each day as a coffee shop before transitioning to a bar just before lunch hour. As we drove, the sun’s new light on the rim’s landscape looked beautiful.

We took our coffee out to the porch, where we sat on the Adirondack chairs, contemplated the canyon in front us, and began to plan our day. A young man came over to us, and seeing the way we were studying our maps, asked whether we were planning a trip into the canyon. I admitted that I was flirting with the idea of trying a short one, but that we didn’t have any real hiking backpacks, which would make it tough. He encouraged us to try it anyway. He had just completed a “rim-to-rim” hike, and said it was amazing.

Encouraged by this advice, we returned our campsite after replenishing our lighter and chocolate supply at the general store. We packed our bags with snacks and lunch for the day’s hike and drove over to the backcountry permit office to discuss our plans with a ranger.

Though the ranger seemed pretty skeptical of my plan to tie our sleeping bags onto day packs, she encouraged us to go for it. “If it were me, I would definitely do it,” she said. So we headed back to our campsite once more for a dry run of our packing system, using twine to tie our sleeping bags — which were not exactly compact models — onto our backpacks. Lo and behold, it worked, and while our packs were far from light, we decided to pull the trigger on an overnight trip down into the canyon. One quick trip back to the permit office, and we had an official permit in hand for one night at Cottonwood Campground, seven miles down the North Kaibab Trail into the Grand Canyon.

Our plans finalized, we were at last ready to start our hike for the day. We had decided to tackle the trail out to Widfors Point, which winds five miles through the North Rim forest out to a beautiful overlook. The first two miles were peppered with intermittent views into the canyon, and then we meandered through the forest for the last three before spilling out onto the end of Widfors Point, where we had lunch: turkey, muenster, avocado, cashew sandwiches and our leftover Jacob Lake Inn cookies.

We hiked back to the car and returned to our campsite, where we went into full production mode for the food we’d need for our trip into the canyon. Once we had a few things squared away, we were ready to relax for the evening, so we drove back down to the rim and ordered drinks at the Rough Rider Saloon to take out onto the porch for sunset. The Adirondack chairs were much more crowded than earlier that morning, but we managed to snag two. The pastel colors of the day’s last sunlight on the ridges of the canyon were just gorgeous.

We returned to our campsite for a long-awaited Mexico night. We had a full selection of salsa, guacamole, chips and Mexican beer to kick off dinner, and Emmy whipped up a delicious Southwestern-inspired dish of spicy chicken sausage, refried beans with jalapeño, a blend of Mexican cheeses, fresh bell peppers, onion and corn salsa. It was perhaps her best campsite creation, and went very well with our surroundings.

Taken during a daytime encore.

As we cooked, I had to make two emergency runs to the general store as we realized we had neither propane nor graham crackers. But once we were restocked, fed and s’moresed, we headed to bed early, excited and nervous for the odyssey that lay ahead.