We slept well and were up at 6:30. It was a very cool night and I almost got up to grab a blanket. I felt well rested and the toe did not hurt so much after spending the day before in Tevas. It still hurt if I pushed down on the nail so I knew something was wrong underneath there. The nail did not look good and I was sure I would be loosing it at some point.

Mary and Hank start hiking out today - they were planning to try an old miner's route from the river up to the Tonto. We say our good-byes and they head out at 7:30. We later heard that they were successful in finding and navigating the route.

Work starts shortly after they leave, a little earlier this day. We spent a couple hours moving compost from the stockpiles near the mule coral down to the nursery near the river ranger station. Robin, Gene and I moved compost while others (Mike, Steve, Pat, Lynn) moved dirt and sand from the river bank to mix with the compost. We finished up with that around 10 and were done working for the day. I found myself actually wishing for more work to do as it was still early in the day and not so hot yet.

Robin and I went over to Phantom Ranch and picked up our sack lunches and I also posted Halloween cards to my nephews. I thought mailing a card from Phantom Ranch with "MAILED BY MULE FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE GRAND CANYON" stamped on it would be a nice touch for Halloween. While we were at the cantina I had some coffee and Robin had lemonade. We tried to figure out what to do for the rest of the day. After a while we go back to the bunkhouse and just hang out. We ate some things from our sack lunches around noon.

After lunch I decided to go out for a short day hike. Robin wanted no part of it and stayed back at the Ranch. I had always wanted to see the lower end of Phantom Canyon, up from where it enters Bright Angel Creek so I decided to give that a go. I headed up along Bright Angel Creek on the North Kaibab Trail, into The Box, and on to the mouth of Phantom Canyon. Crossing Bright Angel Creek was no problem at all. I hiked up Phantom Canyon, sloshing right up the creek bed most of the way, until around 2:30. At that point I came to a big pool that seemed like it would require either a bypass or a very cold swim. The water below the falls was definitely too deep to just wade. It looked like there might be a bypass ledge on left side so I start up and across that way. I didn't get very far when I suddenly met Gene trying to come back the other way as I was about to go around a corner. He said it didn't work and I could see that the ledge was too steeply sloped up ahead. Gene seemed to be having trouble getting down from where he was. I gave him a hand getting down and we headed back to Phantom Ranch together, stopping several times along the way to take photos. We stopped in for a beer at the Phantom Ranch catina on the way and got back to the bunkhouse around 4 pm.

Robin is not in the bunkhouse so I go looking for her. I walked over to the creek to look and could see her further down, on the other side of the bridge that leads to the campground. I went down to join her and to take some photos and after talking there a while we headed back to the bunkhouse, where we had some more snacks from our sack lunches. Mike got back from his day hike - dropping off his water cache near Sumner Wash for a trip coming up in the following week. Steve went with him and together they carried something like 18 liters - a nice cache of water. Mike told us that we had been invited to dinner with the rangers, KJ and he others, at 6:30. We snacked a little more and then we tried packing some stuff up in preparation for our departure tomorrow. We wanted to get an early start in the morning and doing this ahead of time would be a good idea. We tried to figure out what we could leave behind at the bunkhouse to lighten the load as much as possible for the trip over to and back from Clear Creek. Surprisingly we came up with two good-sized bags of food and clothes that we wouldn't need over at Clear Creek.

Dinner with the rangers was fabulous. They prepared a nice filling meal of pasta with meat sauce - great hiking food. I went to the ranger talk afterwards and then headed over to Phantom for a beer where I again joined up with some other from the work crew.