This is our daughter Lena. She digs being outside. Quite the little explorer, she is. We couldn’t be happier or more in love with her. She goes on all our adventures now, albeit just day-trips most of the time.

She’s a good little hiker. Whether she’s in the Bjorn, Ergo or backpack. She’ll chatter or sing, sometimes she sleeps. The happy thing is that we still get out. We even have a Chariot bike trailer for her now, and in the winter we’ll attach the skis to it for cross-country skiing. Lots of fun is in store for this girl.

She may not sleep while camping yet, but she loves getting out there anyway. And the toys are super yummy.

Dave and I have had a very busy few months: we’ve decided to start a new kind of adventure, one involving marriage, steady work, and buying a condo in Boulder, Colorado. We’ve jumped in with both feet and a yip of glee. We’ve proven these last three years we can travel together under challenging circumstances, relying only each other for months at a time, and enjoying (almost) every minute. Our newest challenge is to continue the fun and joy of exploring the outdoors while living a more conventional lifestyle. We think we’re up to this new challenge.

After exploring other locations we are going to start poking around our own back yard, and there’s enough in Colorado to keep us busy for a while! Besides the usual hiking, mountain biking and camping, we’ve set a goal of climbing all of Colorado’s Fourteeners–there are 55 peaks over 14,000 feet in elevation awaiting our feet and curious eyes. In preparation, Dave got me a set of crampons and an ice ax for Christmas! We don’t have a timeline for this goal, but it does give us something to focus on as we approach this new adventure.

Dave and I have returned from our summer in Alaska and Canada and are busy cleaning, sorting and putting away gear. We had some wonderful adventures backpacking, hiking and paddling in many beautiful places.

As soon as we can catch up with ourselves, we’ll be adding photos and stories from the summer to this site. As well, I still need to post the last couple of weeks of my Hayduke Trail notes, which I didn’t have time to get put up in the brief time between trips.

We are well and refreshed, and we’re both ready to get back to work!

The end of the Hayduke Trail trek for us was very busy, and we immediately returned home, swapped gear, and headed north for our summer adventure, so updating the website has been slow! We now have Dave’s photos up in the Photo Gallery and they are terrific. Take a look!

We’ve also added trail notes on water and terrain, our actual mileage and schedule, and other tidbits to the Hayduke Trail Page for those interested in the details. Hopefully this will be helpful for those planning their own Hayduke trek.

We are now writing from White Horse, Yukon in Canada. We just came off a six-day paddle on Atlin Lake, and tomorrow we plan to start the Donjek Trek in Kluane National Park for a week of backpacking, including a visit to the Donjek Glacier!

 

Just after noon on Sunday Dave and I walked our final beautiful mile of the Hayduke Trail, finishing at the Weeping Wall in Zion National Park!

 

Coming down some of the final switchbacks we had everything going through our heads, so it took us off guard when we came upon a woman crouched by the trail snapping pictures and playing something on a mini CD player on the side of the trail. Wait, that music sounds like Chariots of Fire, and that woman looks like our friend Candy. Oh, it is Candy!

We knew Candy would be meeting us at the end, but for some reason I almost walked by her before I recognized her. I blame it on the way hiking sends my brain to la la land. Anyway, we had a good laugh and Candy got some good photos of our tired but happy last moments on the trail. She had met us in Canyonlands near the beginning of the trip, and came down from Salt Lake to help us celebrate the end.

We were blessed with the company of a few other friends here in Zion as well, and we’ve had music-filled evenings and shared meals at the campground together. Yesterday we did some exploring around Zion, another incredibly beautiful place the Hayduke took us to that we must return to when we have more time.

We leave today to return to civilization for a couple of weeks, and then we are on our way to Alaska for the summer for a combination of kayaking and backpacking, though this trip has no schedule to follow. We will post updates now and then to let you know what we’ve come up with.

For now we reflect on and feel thankful for the beauty we’ve seen, the many friends who have blessed us with their company, our family eager to hear stories, and our health and the lifestyle that made this possible. It’s a rich life indeed.

18 miles, 10.5 hours

The Tonto Trail is an easy to follow trail, high above the Colorado River on top of sandstone ledges. It traverses at the same level for something like 70 miles along the river! We missed being able to cool off in the river, but we sure enjoyed the wider view. Because it traverses at the same level instead of dropping down to the river, the trail follows the side drainages back to a point where they can be crossed, adding many miles to the actual river miles traveled. Most of these side drainages are dry, but now and then you find a small trickle running, with shallow pools filled with tadpoles.

TRAIL NOTES:
We found water at: Cottonwood Creek (m. 1.7), a spring (about m. 5.5), Grapevine (m. 6.6), and Lonetree (m. 14.9).

15.5 miles, 10.5 hours

Some of the rugged Escalante Trail today was right along the edge of very tall walls above the river. The trail is cairned in places and can branch off, but it seemed easy enough to follow, though the going was still pretty slow. There are many varieties of cacti blooming in the Canyon, adding color to the red stone and green brush color pallette. Much of the trail is above the river here, so we only were able to cool off a couple of times in the Colorado at the mouths of side canyons.

TRAIL NOTES:
The Beamer and Escalante trails are very rugged and slow going–just don’t expect them to be like the more popular trails in the Grand Canyon. In addition to what the book says, there is also easy river access at mile 36.9 at the mouth of the Escalante River. There was no water from mile 39.7 until Hance Creek at 45.4, which was a good trickle.

Concerning all Grand Canyon mileage: when we compared the mileage in the book to the Grand Canyon trail descriptions that came with our permit, the actual mileage is 10-25% more than what the book says. This may be true for many of the actual trail sections of the Hayduke (as opposed to wash-bottom sections or other parts that don’t tend to have switchbacks). Just be prepared for additional rugged mileage on top of what is in the book.

12 miles, 7 hours

We started on the Beamer Trail, a rugged and sometimes faint trail that can be hard to follow in a few places. We stopped for about three and a half hours for a siesta at lunchtime, resting right by the Colorado River at Tanner Creek. After a nap we cooled off in the river, soaked our handkerchiefs and tied them around our necks, and then moved on, now on the Escalante Trail. This trail is a little more traveled than the Beamer, but is still rough in places.

Hiking along the Colorado is just beautiful. The walls are red and there are different levels to the Canyon that make the view so complicated and interesting that it’s hard to keep moving forward – we just kept stopping to look! It is also amazingly hot, and after the cold we’ve been through on most of the trip so far, this is really a shock to our bodies. Water consumption has gone way up, but luckily we have had frequent access to the river to treat water and stay hydrated while cooling down at the same time.

We are also enjoying the warm nights! No more cold mornings where it’s hard to get going. We are getting up before dawn in order to use the cooler part of the day, and yet it’s so much easier to get up because it’s not frigid. We are loving the Canyon experience so far.

We got up and had coffee and breakfast with the GCMRC folks. It was a rest day for them too, and they would be working the next two weeks straight, so they were ready to enjoy it. After visiting with them for a while, Brent gave us a ride across the river (the book says to hitch a ride across here) and set up camp just downriver from the mouth of the Little Colorado River. Then we explored the LCR a bit, took a swim, and then spent the rest of the day resting and mentally preparing for a couple of hot weeks in the Canyon!

20 miles, 11hours

Walking down Nankoweap Creek was just lovely this morning with so much in bloom we could hardly make progress because we had to keep stopping to look. There were many kinds of cactus blooming in several colors, wild flowers and bushes, century plants and yucca.

When we reached the Colorado River we turned right to bush-whack our way down stream. Without a trail it was slow going, but we found game trails here and there that we could follow for a while. Later in the day we were following rock benches just above the river that made it fun because it was faster at times and involved some scrambling. Finally, near dusk, we came upon the base camp for researchers and volunteers from the Grand Canyon Monitoring & Research Center. They welcomed us to sit down and eat dinner with them (some super tasty enchiladas) and we visited with them the entire evening. What a fun and interesting group of people! They are doing research and recovery efforts to save the Humpback Chub, a native fish in the Grand Canyon.