Can I stay in Grand Canyon trails after the sun goes down without a permit?
How big are fines if some “ranger” find me there at night? Can I hide there (in the bushes) or they will find me everywhere? I don’t want to stay in the camping area. I want to sleep in my hammock one night and than go back to Grand Canyon Village and have a breakfast and go back to Phoenix. Have somebody done this kind of “hardcore-above-the-law” camping in GC before? Thanks for any help.
Tagged with: after • Canyon • down • goes • Grand • permit • stay • trails • without
Filed under: Grand Canyon South Rim
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You can get a permit to camp over night, but the camping is in restricted areas of the canyon.
Dude, there ain’t no place to pitch a hammock that someone can’t see you. There isn’t enough brush in the whole canyon to coneal you.
Well, I’ve been visiting the Canyon for nearly 50 years, and I can’t think of any place on the South Rim where you could hide with a hammock, unless you want to risk a thousand-foot fall in the middle of the night off one of the trails down. I’d just stiffen your spine up and pay the entry fee or go in with a tour group.
As a guy that has solo -hiked almost everything in the Park that NPS describes as a Trail or a Route I respectfully disagree with the other two guys who answered this question
What’s going to get you in trouble with NPS is that you are going to have a vehicle parked overnight by a trail-head and you are not going to have on file the back-country permit with that has your license plate number on it
The legal and practical solution to your problem is to go over to the back -country office and get a back-country permit for an area that the NPS describes as Primitive and therefore allows At Large camping
Use Area BD 9.> Red Canyon Trail would work as would
Use Area BB9 >Tanner Trail
Permit in hand you could find place to string a hammock in the Ponderosas adjacent to the short steep descent of the Red Canyon
Trail
or
You could start down the Tanner Trail and find a place to string a hammock in the trees above the Coconino-Hermit contact.
In all cases practice Leave No Trace camping