The hike was CRAZY!

I can’t even begin to explain how crazy and insane the hike was.

The first day Nikki and I got to the church at 7am and we packed up and started driving to the place where we were going to be hiking out of the canyon.

(riding in the back of the truck)

Then we all got in one truck and met up with everyone else at the trailhead. But… we got lost… The young single adult guy that was in charge of this whole hike (Dallin), had his GPS and the map and everything and we still got lost. Just drove down the wrong dirt road and wouldn’t know it was wrong till we ended up at the wrong place and would have to turn around.

(Finally ready to go!)

It took till 1pm before we met up with the other half of the group and started the first day of hiking. Dallin had said at our packing meeting that at the beginning there was going to be a lot of thorn bushes, and we all didn’t realize what he really was talking about or we weren’t listening, but there were thorns galore!

I felt like the hyena on the lion king that falls into all the thorns bushes! (you remember that part?) Lol, but luckily I was wearing long nylon hiking pants and I didn’t get that scratched up. Some of the girls wore shorts and had blood dripping down their legs from all the scratches. One girl fell into them, and started to cry! Keep in mind this is the first 2 hour of the hike and all of us are thinking, “Why in the world did I sign up for this?”

After we tackled the thorn bushes (they were locust, I think) we arrived to the ponds. Dallin had also warned us about how we were going to have to swim across some ponds, and again we really didn’t understand how hard and cold that was going to be.

(that's me pulling our packs across!! BURRR)

The ponds were pretty clear clean water but it was FREEZING water! When I jumped in I felt like I couldn’t breathe! It was so cold, and at first you couldn’t move or anything. I’m not scared of the water but the cold made me feel like I could have drowned right then and there. While dealing with the cold we were all trying to keep our backpacks dry as well. Nikki and I bought a pool float to ferry our packs across. We were lucky that all our stuff stayed dry (thank goodness!!!) Some people just waterproofed their bags and swam across and had a wet sleeping bag that night.

Anyway, we all got through the first pond and are soaking wet and that’s when a girl named Alesha started getting really cold and kept on getting cold and couldn’t get herself warm. She started shivering really bad and then said she felt sleepy. BAD SIGN! She was going into hypothermia! So we had to wait around a long time helping her warm up. Making her walk around, drink hot cocoa, and stay awake was really all we could do!

So this is the first day, the first few hours and we’ve already had all of this crazy stuff happen! Our pace was SO slow.. we definitely weren’t making 1 mile an hour. We probably only went 500 feet in 1 hour just because the ponds took so long to cross and then get warm after. Plus at the bottom of the canyon it was all boulders so we have to jump from boulder to boulder with our 40lb pack and soaking wet tennis shoes.

(These are the boulders!)

Around this time is when we got separated into two groups. The young adults that were doing fine in the front of the group and the adults that were tying to help Alesha get warm. We got so far separated that there was no way to communicate with them. Dallin was in the first group of people (so was I) and all he wanted to do was speed up the pace to make it to the campgrounds. So we speed up without knowing what all the leaders were going to do with Alesha. Dallin assumed they were going to turn back because she was having such a hard time in the first two ponds and there were 3 more to swim through plus there were a lot of waist deep crossings after that.

Even though everyone was going as fast as we could go we couldn’t do the 7 miles that we were supposed to. Dallin decided to stop at 7:30pm and set up camp. That’s when we realized that we hadn’t stopped through all our hiking for lunch water or snacks! NO WONDER NONE OF US COULD MOVE! I drank less than a cup of water that day and only ate some eggs for breakfast before we left at 7am. Bad huh? Once we stopped everyone realized they were starving and very dehydrated! Everyone in our gourp was okay though; all of us stayed pretty positive. We all ate our lunch and dinner that night and then we were out for the night (except Michael who had a wet sleeping bad, poor guy).

The next morning I thought Dallin would have us up hiking by at least 8am but it was 9am before most of us got out of our tents. Luckily we hadn’t left early because guess who caught up with us? Alesha and all the leaders! We couldn’t believe it! I guess they got Alisha a wet suit and had made it through all the swims!

So after the leaders caught up we all got our little lecture about staying as a group; we needed to hear it! (Especially Dallin!) So through the next day we stayed really close to everyone. Alesha was put in the front and we went as slow as our slowest person. That was good, but also bad at the same time because the 3 miles left over from the day before and the 4 miles we were supposed to hike were taking forever to hike.

When the Leaders cought up to us! Alesha is in the gray jacket standing up on the left side.

putting out the fire

keeping Alesha Company =)

(feeling much better after a good nights sleep and some fruit cups for breakfast!)

To make things worse it started to be really windy…. Then it started to rain… and then hail! Staying dry was out of the question and our only concern was hiking the 7 miles we had to hike before we could get OUT of the canyon. Of course we’re all scared that Alisha would get hypothermia again and there was really nothing we could do except for stop and make a fire to heat her up, but doing that would slow us down way more. After it started to hail the leaders make the decisions that we would hike out that day instead of staying another day in the canyon. All of us were happy about that because it had just been miserably cold and all of us were done.

smiles in the pictures of course but it was really cold!

staying positive!

thinking "please don't fall in"

We trudge through the mud, we slip and trip and fall over the boulders, we swim across freezing water and finally get to where we were going to have to climb straight up out of the canyon.

We stop there and the “drivers” all hike up and out to get the trucks while us hikers wait for two hours till they get back. That’s when I really get worried about Alesha because she was cold. She’s so skinny and she’s got wet clothes on and she’s shivering and she will get hypothermia again. We all know she will if she sits for any length of time. So I pull my stove out and make her hot cocoa again and Dallin tried to get a fire started but all the wood is wet and it’s taking forever. That’s when one other girls says she saw a cave back a little bit off the trial and we all decide to go back and wait there.

Nikki and I

drying out clothes out

The problem was that Alisha would have to cross the water again. It was waist deep there and she couldn’t do it. She said no no no, but we forced her to and finally got her in the cave. While I was trying to get her through the water Dallin had gone ahead and had the fire started by the time we got there. We all huddled around the fire for the next hour and then it was time to hike out and hope the leaders were back with the trucks. Before we leave, I make Alesha eat a ramen cup and do jumping jacks and stuff just so she would be okay on the climb out. She made it out great after that and we all survived!

Our last steep climb out of the canyon

It was really muddy!

There were no real bad injuries but we were all pretty beat up and sore. We all were happy and proud of ourselves for making it out alive. I never thought I would have been able to do a hike that was that hard, but when you’re stuck at the bottom of a canyon you don’t really have a choice… lol, it was fun though. It was super hard, but rewarding at the end.

I felt bad for Nikki, who had come on the hike because I had said how awesome the last hike was and how much fun she would have and then it turned out to be so hard. She was a trooper though and handled it well just like everyone else. She did say on the way home that she was never going on another backpacking hike again. =(

When we got back to town it was snowing and cold cold cold. When Nikki and I got back to Erin and Jeremy they were so happy we were home and had been so worried about us because they knew if they were having bad weather we must have been having even worse weather. It was crazy!! The pictures look lush and green and beautiful, and it was but it was still the hardest hike I have EVER done!

I still can't wait for the next one! (I say it was the hardest one every time, heehee)