Dark Canyon

Here I am at the trailhead. Notice I am wearing my Hostinella shirt from Cathy. Always a dangerous/scary decision. :) Just kidding--sort of.

After 2-3 miles of flat desert, we came to a couple of areas where we down-climbed a bit. Then we came to the serious downhill! One vertical mile down. An ancient rock slide took away the sheer canyon wall and made it possible to pick your way down through the boulders. There's a trail of sorts. Cairns show the "easiest" way down. On the left here (above) is a pic looking down. And on the right is Jody down quite a ways towards the bottom.

This is one of my favorite pics. It is taken from the top and shows where we camped. If you look in the center of the pic you can see where a stream is flowing (you can't actually see the stream, but you can see the curve where the stream goes). That's Dark Canyon. Almost smack in the middle of the picture, in that river bed, you can see tiny, tiny trees. That's where we camped!

Pics of our camp. Definitely desert! Sheer canyon wall behind us. Stream in front of us. It was absolutely gorgeous!

OK, here's a couple of fun pictures. On the left you see me pumping water. Notice how hard I'm working. NOT! It's my new Platypus water purification system. You scoop up water into the "dirty" bag and using gravity it drains into the "clean" bag. You then use the clean bag as your bladder. Or you can just hold a Nalgene under the short hose attached to the "dirty" bag and let the water pour into your bottles that way. There's a little clamp to stop the flow when you don't want the water to come out. So whenever you want water you just have to pop the clamp and purified water pours out. No more pumping! On the right are sprouts. I took 2 sprouters with me and sprouted as I backpacked. It takes a lot of water, but with my new system that doesn't matter. It's easy--just a few minutes of care in the morning and in the evening. And then fresh greens for lunch every day! I mixed my sprouts with soy nuts, dried cherries and a few almonds and then tossed them with a little pouch of Italian dressing. Yum!

Just a couple of beautiful views taken of the area from our campsite. I love canyons, and I love desserts. The out- of-doors and camping and hiking recharge my aura!

Here are some photos of our day hike. Obviously me on the left. A pic of the stream we followed down to the Colorado River (we didn't go all the way) in the middle. Sometimes we were walking along the stream and other times we were way up above it. This is a way up photo, obviously. And then on the right is a fossil. Cool, huh? By the way--for those of you who aren't technological, you can click on these smaller pictures and a big one will pop up so you can see more details.

The left photo shows Jody and me heading out on our last day. The one on the right shows a scout troop coming down just as we were heading up. They look far away because they were way above us. If you can't see the boys, try clicking on the pic.

A sight for sore eyes. Way in the background you can see our car. Yeah! But then we still had the "treacherous" trip out that difficult dirt road! We were sure happy when we turned onto the asphalt highway!