Grand Canyon Hike

We thought we’d share a few pictures from our Grand Canyon hike to Vasey’s Paradise. Dan and the boys had talked about backpacking in, and since I couldn't talk them into our usual spring break trip to Southern CA, I decided to join them. When we pulled up to the trail head, they acknowledged that they didn’t think that I would really come, and that this was a pretty strenuous hike. As we started down the trail we were on a rocky cliff and had to hand down back packs immediately because the cliff trail was so narrow. Dan almost made us turn around within the first 20 yards. We had just driven 3 hours to get there, so we talked him into continuing on. It is a 2,500 foot decent and we did it in 4 ½ hours. Every step is on a rock and has to be steadied and sured. We descended two large steep rock washes,you can see one in the picture that I am pointing up at. Crazy! My legs were like rubber the last hour but we finally got down to the Colorado River. Dawson jumped in the freezing river a few times, that comes out of the bottom of Lake Powell. He was out pretty quickly!

We left our packs on the beach and hiked over to Vasey’s falls that come out of the rock canyon wall. We replenished our water supply there. When we got back to our camp we found that some ring tail cats had clawed through Dan’s pack and sampled our jerky and a sealed bag of chicken(dinner). The night was fairly warm and pleasant despite our sore muscle sand thin mats. After our oatmeal breakfast, we got on the trail early so it wouldn’t take me two days to get out. Luckily, it was all uphill on Friday,so I was using a new set of muscles. A lot of the trail is done using both hands and feet to get up the rocks and an occasionally hand up by the boy sand a boost from below from Dan helped a lot. There was a nice cool breeze that helped but it turned into a whipping wind at the top as we tried to negotiate the cliffs again. Needless to say, we made it up and out in four hours. We can’t walk today but it was a great adventure!!