Saturday, August 25, 2007

The Decent!

The start of our journey was pretty hard, but very much worth it! We had to drive about 6 hours from Las Vegas, so we started our hike down in the middle of a pretty hot day! There were some amazing views along the way. I tried to capture the jist of the trip so that I wouldn't use up all my camera batteries before actually getting to the falls.The first picture is of Carey and I at the top of the Grand Canyon. The next two show my five fellow hikers and what we had to hike down at the beginning. Then the last two pictures show the hike at bottom of the canyon.



This last picture is my favorite! We were hiking through rocks for a few miles and finally we saw our first sign of life (besides sagebrush and cactus). It was beautiful!

Water In Sight!

Our first sign of water!!!More water! :)
Surely we must be getting close to the village now!
Tyler and Carey ended up running ahead so they could make it to the office before it closed. They ended up getting there about ten minutes before the office was supposed to close... close call! I didn't take pictures of the village. It was an amazing sight! Probably had more horses and dogs than people, and yet there are two churches and a school there!
After the village we hiked another two miles to Havasu Falls...

Havasu Falls!!!

We finally made it to the falls! These particular pictures don't show the blue color of the water. It was amazing! Two weeks before we went a flood happened, so the week prior to our visit the waters were brown. Perfect timing for us!!!

Carey and I decided to climb up to this spot. Part of it was a little scary to climb because of how slick it was, but we made it! Everyone else came up and I decided we needed a picture... that's why I'm not in this awesome pic.

This last picture was a fun one to take! I climbed up some rock and had to lean over the edge and stretch out my arm so that I could try to get the falls between those trees. It was quite fun!

Mountain Women!

My hair was bugging me pretty bad, so I told Carey to cut it a bit. We only had knives with us, so it was quite a mountain woman adventure!


We were all pretty tired after all the hiking, but we were so excited!!!

Mooney Falls Hike (part one)

This is the view from above Mooney Falls. It was another beautiful waterfall! These pictures show the first part of our hike down to the falls. There were cave/tunnel things we had to climb down in and they were pretty steep!



This last picture is the view we had between the two intense tunnels.

Mooney Falls Hike (part two)

Hopefully these pictures show the steepness of the hike down. It was a little scary, I'll be honest... especially since we all carried our water and cameras down there.









This picture shows the tunnels pretty well.




I love these last two pictures! You can really see how this was once a bunch of wet mud dripping down... It's crazy that it is what we hiked down!

Mooney Falls...

We made it to the falls at last! Time to play!!!



The End of the Road...

We decided to hike to another falls, so we started walking down river again...

There were a lot of awesome views on our way!


I think these were large fields of grape vines... we didn't see any grapes though. I kept looking for some yummy things to munch on!
Well, we finally made it to the last falls... or so we thought! As we started to hike back some people came from behind us and informed us of the fact that the falls we were looking were actually another 30ish minutes down and that it was a pretty hard hike. Half of us decided to keep going... I was in the half that decided to go back to camp and eat food!

Hiking back to camp...

While the others kept hiking to find the last falls...

Bonnie, Carey and I stopped to swing on this rope swing...



took a wrong turn and found this awesome waterfall to stand under...



and floated on our backs down this calm area of river! It was definately more relaxing than what the others were doing!

The Last Day; Most Difficult Part!

We woke up at 4am and probably left at about 4:45ish. We wanted to hike up as much as we could before the sun came up.
It was a beautiful morning!
This was our last stop before the sun. We had two miles, which happen to be the worst miles of the 10, to go and it would all be in the hot sun!
Bonnie and I were the slow ones, but we tried to make it fun for each other. She had horrible blisters on her feet that killed and I had a Migrane. But, we managed to smile and laugh through the pain and blistering heat! :) She's awesome!
This is right before we got to the REALLY hard part, but my camera ran out of batteries, so Bonnie has the pictures with the super fake smiles! What an amazing experience!!!