Fall Break Mystery Adventure

Way back mid September, two of my friends took a mid-week backpacking trip.  I hiked in one afternoon after school to say hi and see the scenery.  As we sat by their fire, we started scheming a trip when all three of us could go--which meant we needed to wait for my next long break from school, more than a month away.  Knowing our opportunity for adventure would be in mid October, we tentatively planned to head south to warmer mountains.

After that, there was very little about this trip that I planned.  I am usually a planner-type-person, I pack seven kinds of jackets and decide a week in advance what day I will pack.  This trip got out of my hands, and I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being a week away from leaving and not knowing which day we were starting our trip, what day we were coming back, who was coming, or even where we were going.  Trying not to imply that I didn't trust their planning and endeavoring not to be annoying, I would casually ask my friends, as if it didn't really matter to me at all, when we were leaving and where we would going.  Every time I asked I got a different answer.  Once they told me that one other friend was coming, then two, then four, maybe more.  We were going to Zion, maybe the Grand Canyon, maybe some backwoods places not really close to anything I'd heard of.  We were all driving together, then my two close friends were going to stay a few extra days, then they were going to stay for two weeks, then they were going to leave two days early, too.

When Monday came, I was becoming increasingly apprehensive.  This trip was sounding awfully vague, which in my experience often meant badly prepared for and not as fun as it could be if it had actually been plan.  Then, all of the plans changed again that day.  My friends decided not to stay in the woods for weeks, so suddenly we could drive together again.  Brian had our campsites, mileage, and water needs planned from personal experience gained while spending two entire months camping in the area he wanted to take us to.  Then, all of the other people dropped out, and it ended up being just the three of us, just like we had originally planned.  I must admit, I seriously underestimated the planning habits of my camping companions.  We stayed up late getting things ready Tuesday night (about 2 a.m.), and when I headed to school Wednesday morning, I was not only exhausted but worried.  Things were a mess.  Our stuff was piled in random stacks and bags and grocery sacks and paper bags.  Dishes were set out on random countertops between two different apartments, things still needed to be purchased, and I was feeling panicked.  How was all that going to be resolved when I was away teaching all day?  The guys were supposed to pick me up from school that day and we'd take off from there.  I would have no time for last minute packing and reorganizing.  I would just have to trust them to work all morning to magically organize and plan and pack everything.  I was skeptical, I was doubtful, I was downright unhappy as I put the finishing touches on my sub plans for Monday and entered grades.

I have to hand it to them: the boys pulled through.  They picked me up from school with a car packed full of meticulously organized bags of food and supplies, extra things packed for just in case, and all of it arranged with Tetris-esque precision in the car.  We drove off into the sunset, and I relaxed and just let the guys handle the trip.  Seriously, they handled everything.  When we pulled up to a campsite in southern Utah that night at midnight, they had a fire built and dinner cooking without any help from me.  I didn't even know where things were packed.  So I set up the tent and got the bags ready, and just kicked back.  That first night we stayed up late, really really late.  We looked at the stars, we built a big fire, we ate cheesy pasta, we sang songs, we watched the moon rise.  We saw dawn start to lighten the eastern sky.

This is only one of the about two dozen fire pictures I took.

Did I mention it was 5 a.m.?
Did I mention we'd stayed up until 2 a.m. the night before packing?

Then we finally went to bed.  Since I get up at 5:30 everyday, I woke up long before Brian and Will, who both work evenings at a restaurant and hotel.  So I explored around our camp.  We were camping in a juniper forest, which opened up into the strangest woods I'd ever seen only a hundred yards from our camp.  It was a deadwood forest.  A fire had killed, but not burnt the trees years before.  It was almost spooky, despite the cheerful daylight.

What my waking up before everyone else looks like.  

When the boys got up and we finally ate breakfast/lunch, we started gathering wood, an easy task with the deadwood forest so close.  We were headed into the real desert after this campsite, and there would be no gathering wood for the rest of the trip.  So we compiled an impressive stock of the some of the best firewood I've ever seen and the guys lashed it to the top of the car.

"I'm gonna wrangle this wood and take it the market." 

The ability to break down trees sort of went to his head.

Then we drove the rest of the day.  We camped that night in northern Arizona, far away from cell phone service and paved roads.  The next morning (Friday), we drove to the trailhead and hiked Mount Trumbull.  The trail wound through rocks and juniper into a forest of beautiful pine, tall, straight, and draped in perpetual late afternoon light.  The ground was carpeted with long needles, ranging in color from the orange of freshly fallen needles, to the gray-white of sun-bleached older layers.  On top of the needles were plentiful dark pine cones, making a beautiful contrast to the pale needle ground cover.

We reached the top, ate lots of trail mix (this trip involved the consumption of gallons worth of trail mix), and enjoyed the view and the sunshine.  Then, as we descended back into the forest, we stopped to play baseball.

Up to bat.

The pitcher.

After our hike we drove to a spot to see some rock art and got a bonus of a beautiful sunset on the hike out.

That night we drove to Tuweep/Toroweap, which is described like this,

If you’re a serious solitude seeker who doesn’t mind a little extra effort to achieve some peace and quite, then boy, do I have a spot for you! It is called Tuweep, and it lies on the north rim of the Grand Canyon on land known as the “Arizona Strip.” It is one of the most remote places in the United States, with one of the most spectacular views in the world. It takes an extra dose of adventurous spirit and the ability to put up with everything “primitive and rustic” to enjoy this adventure, but if you can make the effort the reward will be well worth the trip. For most adventurers, Tuweep can only be accessed by one of three bone jarring, tooth rattling dirt roads, the shortest of which is 60 miles, and the longest a wearying 90 miles of dusty, rutted, sometimes impassable dirt. For this reason, Tuweep experiences far fewer visitors per year than any other site on the canyon.

(http://www.swaviator.com/html/issueMA02/Tuweep3402.html).

We didn't see the view that night, though Brian assured us it would spectacular when we woke up.  By the time we got to Tuweep, it was well past dark, and the only part of the description we could testify to was the "primitive" road.  Although the campground had few amenities (no running water, garbage, check-in, cell-phone service, etc.), it did have a very clean and comparatively sweet-smelling pit toilet.  After two days of camping on BLM land, it seemed like like an incredible luxury.  Although we got there after dark, Will had been planning our dinner since Tuesday, when he stayed up late spicing steaks and packing them into individual bags to let them soak up the spices for days.  He had gathered special wood on Thursday to create better coals to cook over, and when we finally arrived at Tuweep on Friday night, he got down to business.  While we waited for the coals to be perfect, Brian and Will got to work on the hors d'oeuvres: Triscuits, summer sausage, and cheese roasted over the fire with a double sided grill Will and Brian jerry-rigged with twisty ties.  What did I do to help?  I read out loud to them, told them stories from Norse mythology, and pitched the tent.  I felt thoroughly spoiled on this trip.  Will even let me have the first steak.  It was fantastic.

The master chef crafts the perfect coals.

Appetizers

A serious stake over serious coals.  

In the morning, we woke up to this:

We packed up everything we needed for breakfast and hiked an easy fifteen minutes to the rim itself: a 3000 foot drop down to the Colorado River.  It was completely breathtaking.  I'd never seen the Grand Canyon before, but I had high expectations.  However, no expectation can really prepare you for the reality, complexity, enormity, and beauty of that canyon.  After goofing around taking pictures on the edge for a while, we cooked our oatmeal, Then we spent hours just laying in the sun on a cliff edge, alternating staring out at the canyon and up at the impossibly blue, completely cloudless sky.

Then Brian taught us to make walking sticks from a Yucca cactus, which led to hours of crafting, and then days of horseplay and sword fighting.  After hanging out at camp for a while, we packed up our pasta supplies and two different kinds of tea and headed back out to the rim to watch the starts come out over the canyon.  The stars were some of the most awesome (in the old-fashioned booming voice and quick intake of breath kind of way) I have seen in my life.  That led to more hours of laying on rocks watching the sky.

The next day, Sunday morning, we clambered around on the rocks at our campsite, and then moved on.  We drove several more hours on the "bone-rattling" roads to Whitmore Point, where even Brian had never been.

A trace of civilization.

One of the side roads we stopped by for a bathroom break.  

It ended up being one of the coolest places we went on our trip.  At some point in the last few million years, a lava flow cut over and through the sandstone of the canyon and actually dammed the Colorado River.  The dam lasted 20,000 years before breaking.  This makes Whitmore point a confusing and delightful mix of lava rock both porous and smooth, river and lake rocks, and the characteristic sedimentary rock of the canyon.  While exploring a side ravine we nick-named the Dragon's Nest, we saw a tarantula.  It was blocking the only easy way out of the ravine, and I gathered up my courage and sprinted past it into a patch of cactus.  Go figure.

Monday morning, in our few remaining hours before we needed to start the long drive back, we hiked down to the Colorado River.  From Whitmore Point, the hike is fairly easy and safe, and takes an hour at most.  We jumped into the cold water of the river and washed off days of dust.  I'm not sure how effective that was, even with the biodegradable soap I had brought that we gleefully scrubbed off with.  The water was nearly opaque.  But it still felt fantastic to clear out five days of grease from my hair and layers of sunscreen from my skin.

While we dried off on the river bank in the warm Arizona sun, a flotilla of rafters drifted by.  Two men in a duckie came up to chat, and we found out they were on DAY 16 of their float trip. They must have been on the river a long time, because they talked like they were from a renaissance fair, and seemed so happy to see us that they began throwing us Canadian Beer.  In the end, we ended up with a free six pack worth of non-Utah beer (This is significant because beer is both more expensive and watered down in Utah).  Too bad beer tastes gross.

We finally got back to the car and began to drive home.  We arrived at St. George and our first paved road, water fill-up, gas station, and cell-phone service in four days.  We got there with about ten minutes of gas left in the car and two gallons of water.  I clutched my cell phone for half an hour before we got there, waiting to call my mom.  Because I hadn't known where we were going, I couldn't prepare her for me being out of contact on a mystery camp trip with boys she'd never met.  I was worried there'd be helicopters searching for us.  The guys watched the gas gauge anxiously, I watched my phone.

We drove and drove and drove.  The guys eventually fell asleep, and I took over driving for the first time all trip.  I listened to This American Life, I sang Broadway songs, nonsense songs, jazz, hymns, anything I could think of.  We got back to my school, and I climbed into my cold car, which had been sitting in the school parking lot for six days.  Then I drove the weary half hour back to my apartment, and dragged my dusty pack up to my apartment at about 2 a.m.  Three hours later I staggered up off my bed and out the door to teach.  I hit the ground running this week.  I've got 200 projects and papers to grade by Friday, I've got class and homework, and I've got a trip home planned this weekend.

Despite the stress it's placed on this week, and despite my apprehensions going into it, this mystery adventure turned out to be one of my favorite trips I've ever taken.