A Journal in an Ammo Can: What Hikers Wrote at Havasupai Gardens, Grand Canyon

In 2018, someone on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon tossed a green journal into a backpack and carried it down the Bright Angel Trail to the campground at Indian Garden — since renamed Havasupai Gardens. There it went into an old ammo can under a shady tree, with a single prompt: take a minute and reflect.

Two years in the canyon

When the park's Behind the Scenery podcast team retrieved it, the journal looked as if it had lived in the canyon: coated in red dirt, the cover warped, rained on more than once, and stained — one stain helpfully labeled ramen broth. Inside, it was full from cover to cover with hundreds of names, drawings, poems and stories.

Reading it, the podcast's host said, was like looking through a small window into the place. Hikers wrote about how lovely the creek was, how much their feet hurt, and how little they looked forward to the climb back up. They wrote about their lives at home, their love for the people they were hiking with, and why they had crossed the world to see this canyon — thoughts shared among strangers and found nowhere else.

What they wrote

The podcast read a few entries aloud. Among them:

• A visitor from New Zealand, on a first trip to the canyon in January 2020, alone and lucky to have snagged a last-minute campground permit the morning after arriving, found the place humbling. Hiking solo had given time to think, and to conclude that a life spent only on our own interests won't fulfil us — that happiness comes from working for others' well-being and for something larger than ourselves.
• A local who had hiked the canyon many times wrote in March 2020 that it never stopped amazing them. The world seemed to be in chaos, they wrote, but some truths hold: the canyon heals mind and body if you let it; it has outlasted everything and will outlast us; and the right response is to be kind to everyone.

That was the journal's last entry.

The theme that kept returning

What stood out across the pages was kindness — people urging kindness to one another, to the canyon, to themselves, in everything. The podcast left listeners with two questions: why do you think so many hikers wrote about that? And what moment of kindness in your own life has stayed with you?

Getting there

Havasupai Gardens from above. NPS/M. Quinn

Sources

Based on "Notes from the Deep - Hiker Reflections from Havasupai Gardens — BTS Podcast 28," Behind the Scenery podcast by the interpretation team at Grand Canyon National Park, March 2023, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The episode was recorded before the Havasupai Gardens name took effect. Hikers' journal entries are paraphrased without their names; the podcast's artwork is left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.