A Southwest Adventure

Another two weeks of summer have flown by. Thankfully the last two weeks of my summer have been arguably the most fun two weeks of any summer I have ever had. Some people enjoy water parks for vacations, others enjoy amusement parks, but how about the United States National Parks? My group and I managed to hit 5 of them. Figuratively of course. Clint Lacure, a good friend of mine who will be deploying in the Army soon, and myself had been talking throughout the spring 2014 semester at Purdue about doing a road trip out west to hike the Grand Canyon. We eventually decided to officially start pursuing the idea toward the end of the semester when we added Andy Hesselbrock to our line up. We had no idea how much planning a trip like this could take! To get backcountry permits in some of these National Parks, you need to reserve them up to 6 months ahead of time! Many of the hikes we did were some of the most popular in the world. We being college now-planners started planning only about 5 weeks ahead of our departure date of Friday, June 20th, so needless to say, we were a bit behind on our planning. I was however amazed in retrospect how quickly and efficiently we were able to put this trip together. Our trip began on Friday, June 20th, where we departed at 4am EDT for St. Louis, MO to visit the Gateway Arch. Our trip then concluded back in West Lafayette, IN on Sunday, July 6th at around 8am EDT after 17 hours of continuous driving. SO MUCH CORN. Everything in between is found in my journal entries below. Enjoy!

Saturday, June 21st – Grand Canyon National Park

Me outside the NWC in Norman, OK

Driving straight here was an unbelievable experience! Not to mention stopping at the Storm Prediction Center and Meteor Crater. So much science!! This trip may turn out to be quite educational. Working with SPC chief Roger Edwards was unbelievable. He taught me a lot about the importance of analysis. This guy has been working in SPC for close to 30 years and practically was speaking in another language to me expecting me to understand it all. I tried, sometimes in vain, but this gives me something to strive for! Repetition, repetition, repetition… Seeing the Grand Canyon again is like seeing it for the first time. Your head literally cannot wrap its mind around it. It’s probably not real. Aliens… thats the usual cause of crazy things right? I feel as though I can come here a thousand times and not get bored of seeing it. Pictures can’t capture the depths of its landscapes and neither can yo brains… ITS CRAZY. AND I’M GOING IN IT!!!!!

 

Its amazing how much of a different world it is out west. From soil contents, to climate, to people. Its a very different region that has a completely different natural beauty that I believe as a native Hoosier can fully appreciate.

Wednesday, June 25th – Powell Lake in Page, Arizona

So going into the Grand Canyon is way better than seeing it from the top. It was hot on levels I didn’t think were possible, but it was unbelievable to experience such a sight from within to put everything into perspective. I took an uncountable number of pictures today that I am sure will not come out as I hoped cause this thing is just SO BIG … well, GRAND! On our way down, we started very early at about 4am. I had 3 liters of water packed for since the there is no water on the South Kaibab Trail and took us about 6 hours since we stopped to enjoy the scenery so much. It was 7 miles in length and 4780 feet of decent. If you really wanted, you could nearly cut that decent time in half with no breaks. The sunrise from Oh Ah Point was one of the best I have ever seen and also makes for great pictures. I highly encourage any future hikes to start before sunrise and then stop at Oh Ah for a snack and water break. Did I mention it was hot? Both hikes on the way down and up were hot! At Bright Angel Campground (where we stayed), it was 109 in the shade and 124 in the sun by midday! The heat was like a wall that just kept you from wanting to do anything at all… So we didn’t. Thankfully, there was a heavenly cool stream right next to our campsite that made the day heat more bearable. A note for the future, SECURE your food in the campground! The fat squirrels will eat anything and everything. Those jerks ate my banana chips and bagels. On the way back up, we woke up at 2am so we could be on the trail by 2:45am. Our thoughts were that if we started early enough, we wouldn’t have to hike in the day heat at all. Bad news about the early start, scorpions were everywhere. I saw 2 before even leaving our campsite. It was a hard hike back up Bright Angel Trail, but we made it out by around 9:30am. Thankfully, there were many water stations along Bright Angel, so we didn’t have to carry as much water as we did on the South Kaibab. It was 9.5 miles in length and 4380 feet of elevation gain. In other words… ALL YO LEGS WILL BE SORE! I consider myself to be very strong aerobically as I am a runner, but I was breathing heavy and my legs were feeling the elevation swag. It would be useful to train at least a little bit before this hike. Funny story on the way up, many of the tourists asked us what we were doing and cheered us on as if we were in a competition. As if we had discovered the place. This was very encouraging and actually helped us handle the hike up. It also was SUPER helpful to say hi to everyone on the trail too.. and I mean EVERYONE! This keeps your moral high and your thoughts off of how tired you are, helping you to further enjoy the experience. Also, a ton of people acknowledged my Purdue shirt, just noting that Purdue is one heck of a big network!

Just after Skeleton Point.

As of currently, I journal from Page, Arizona and am comfortably drunk. The last two nights we have gotten drunk to help us fall asleep in the 80+ degree heat. Sounds immature, but its worked wonders! Sleeping in the desert is hard. I will never take air conditioning for granted again after this trip. Powell Lake, the place we are staying, is such a wonderful place. HOT, but beautiful in its own way. The lake itself is created by the Glen Canyon Dam which we managed to tour for $5 during the day. We saw it as a way to get out of the heat. Back at Lake Powell, Clint and I made our way to a large rock in the middle of the lake this afternoon and it was a lonnnnng way out there (about 100 minutes round trip), but fun! Bugs everywhere, sandstone, freezing cold water in the 100 degree heat but you know. Otherwise met some awesome people that gave us free food on the beach tonight! SO GOOD! … Clint probably ate too many beans. I say nothing more. We definitely would’ve spent more money without them though. Thank God.

Powell Lake… View of giant rock we swam to on the left.

I’ve also learned so much about the stars from Andy. Yay for Andy! I love the stars and have been looking at them for a long time but have never had someone knowledgeable enough to teach me. The night before we started our Grand Canyon hike, we went to the Grand Canyon star party were all these astronomers had brought their telescopes for us to use. We saw Saturn, Mars, clusters and stars that were a long way away. Its pretty much awesome. MORE SCIENCE!! We leave for Zion tomorrow, can’t wait! Good night.

Friday, June 27th – Zion National Park

What a crazy day at Zion National Park. Got in yesterday to grab our permits, apparently you can’t leave the backcountry without buying another permit… This is dumb because it means we need to find a new place to stay tomorrow for when we are done with the narrows, which will be sweet!!

Anyway, today we hiked 12.2 miles and gained 1870 feet of elevation from camp to observation point. Our camp was located where the East Rim Trail and the Trail to Cable Mountain split. Great location and great hike from there to obs point. Long, but some very nice scenery along the way and obs point was unbelievable! Also, starred death in the face multiple times today. First, we saw 2 flibin raddle snakes right on the trail to obs point. We flipped out to say the least. I’ve never heard Clint (an Army man) raise his voice before, so when he did, I made sure to BACK UP! Than I ran out of water within 30 minutes of leaving obs point (it was maybe 2 hours back). By the time we made it back to camp, I was exhausted and quite dehydrated. Very dry mouth, beginning to feel dazed and all this after only an hour and a half. Couldn’t imagine coming here for the first time and having to bring water to survive. Crazy.

Tomorrow we head to the narrows! Will be packing the Go-Pro and hopefully will get some great pictures! Stars out, good night.

Monday, June 30th – On the Road

Wow! Zion NP is definitely my favorite stop so far on our trip. The trails were great, the weather was relatively comfortable, and the scenery was fantastically variable in comparison to the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon wins by far in terms of its views and vistas, but Zion had much more to offer. Observation point is the biggest view in the park I would say and Angels Landing is practically a climb with an almost equally cool view as observation point. My favorite hike of this trip so far was the Narrows! Your trail IS the Virgin River and your surroundings are unbelievably breathtaking. The water is very cool but you can stay warm since the air temperature is so spice. We also found a few places where the water was deep enough for us to jump in off of rocks. Some of those jumps might have been a bit sketchy, but it turned out okay. The only down side, this is Zion’s most popular hike so it is very heavily populated, but even so it was still an awesome hike! Andy did not have his phone on him (good thing too!) so we don’t know how far we went in. We estimate that we went about 3-4 in and out, giving us a total of about 6-8 miles.

We then hiked Angel’s Landing after the Narrows. We wanted to make it back before the last bus left at 9:45pm, so we were in a big hurry going up the 2881 foot cliff. As tired as we were from our day at the Narrows, the view of the sunset from Angel’s Landing was well worth the hike!

 

 

Tuesday, July 1st – Fruita, Colorado

So here we sit in a little camp ground in Fruita, CO. Our tour of the south west is over and so begins our final leg of our trip. Its hard to believe we start our way back home in 3 days but I’m gonna try hard not to think about it, its been real fun. Today we hiked out of Canyonlands. Roughly hiking 4 miles out and about 5 miles in. Our camp ground was unbelievable! Campsite CP-2 and it was way out in the middle of no where. We saw a beautiful sunset as we ate our dinner. Truly an experience I won’t forget from this trip. Canyonlands is a weird place. More aliens probably. I say weird as a positive adjective because the place made it seem like we were on a martian planet. All of the trails were over rock, so they were marked by rock piles which made navigating a tad more interesting. We got to Canyonlands late in the day so we wanted to make sure that we made it to our campsite before sunset so we would not have to navigate rock piles at night. Doing it during the day is sometimes hard enough.

For the rest of the CURRENT day, we played at Arches National Park. And when I say played, I mean we sat on rocks, climbed on rocks, walked on rocks, looked at rocks, but they were all cool rocks. It was hot and we were pretty tired, so it was hard to enjoy. However, it was really cool to see the arches/windows and was super fun to climb some of them too.

Try and find me!

Got my heart pounding today when I lost my Go-Pro! So many awesome pictures would’ve been lost, but thankfully I found it when a French gentleman overheard Clint and I talking about finding it, he pointed us to its location and it was still there!! Woo! That’ll make your day.

 

Thursday, July 3rd – Colorado Springs, Colorado

Went to Garden of the Gods yesterday and rock climbed! I’ve been rock climbing before but never for real. We climbed a 100 foot rock to the top and I was scared to death but was so crazy fun! I now know that I will not be taking up rock climbing as a hobby. Clint and a friend named Joel did most of the “real” climbing. From there we went to where Katy was staying for the summer which apparently was just some navigator staff members house. It was so nice of that family to let a bunch of strangers crash at their house! Chad, and all the Koesters were there! We all went out for Mexican and had way too expensive margaritas, but it was fun. We got to tell all of our stories and people definitely respected us for the trip. I might need to get used to it for the next few weeks.

 

Saturday, July 5th – Back in corn country…

On our way home! Hard to believe its all over. Driving through corn fields are as boring as I remember. Last night was really fun without considering the fireworks. A day hike to a water fall in snow mountain, putt putt, followed by traveling to grand lake for the afternoon. People of all nationalities were present. Just an absurd amount of people for such a small town, but I’m sure local businesses were loving it. It rained for maybe 30 minutes 2 hours before the fireworks show. It was kinda bad though thankfully our spot was being held by others. Clint, Sam and I managed to find some cross country backpackers named Stride and Smiles. What a crazy story they had. They started on the border of Mexico in late April and have been backpacking north ever since. Their goal is to reach Canada which I’m sure they will do by early August. Stride had hiked the Appalachian Trail, the PCT, and they were currently doing the CDT. Unbelievable! Wow would it be cool to do that if I had the money and time.

Clouds in Colorado…

Last night we ended up staying at a friends house garage in Granby. It was actually super nice not having to set up tents or anything. Slept super deep and really feel used to “roughing it”. Time to go home I guess. Another quick point, I brought way too many clothes on this trip. Probably because I thought I would sweat buckets… On the contrary, it has been so dry out here that all moisture evaporates instantly.

Lastly today, we went to visit Clints Aunt and Uncles place. They bought us lunch and his uncle showed us the business that he worked for and was very passionate about. Super nice of them! Data View was a company that made plates for laser cutting of waffles (kinda like motherboards for phones… Not the food), to make them more flat. It was interesting!

Tuesday, July 8th – Owen Main Office

Nothing like being back in the humid Midwest! Typing on a computer makes my fingers feel like they are old rusty gears that can’t move smoothly. It’s definitely great to be back in home with a bed and air conditioning, but I definitely don’t recognize how awesome this trip was. I may never again be able to visit (AND HIKE) 5 national parks in the span of 2 weeks. I know I will go back to many of these places, but not like this time.

Things I won’t miss… Giant annoying crows (aka Frank) waking us up every morning, FAT squirrels eating my food, chipmunks climbing my back TRYING to eat my food, peanut butter, crunchy peanut butter, granola bars and peanut butter, granola bars and crunchy peanut butter, freaking Denver traffic, the crammed backseat of a Chevy Cobalt, unpacking and repacking of the backseat and trunk of said Chevy Cobalt and lastly… THE HEAT.

This was a trip of a life time, and I hope to keep finding adventures.

 

 

Find more pictures on my Facebook.

 

Update: Well shoot dang. So I can’t believe I did this, but I forgot that Arches is a National Park! So we actually hit 6 national parks on this trip!

Also here are some interesting facts from our trip:

• 70 miles of hiking
• 2.5 miles of elevation gain
• about 4,300 miles of driving
• Max temp: 109F (124F in the sun) | Min temp: 46F