Grand Canyon

Last week Boyfriend flew back out here and we tackled one of the biggest items off my bucket list.  We backpacked the Grand Canyon along with my friend Dallas (my labmate Slim was supposed to come, but bailed too last minute for us to find a replacement).  We drove up to the South Rim Wednesday and camped there before hiking in on Thursday.  We did rim-to-rim-to-rim (45 miles) in 4 days, hiking out on Sunday.

For those who care about the hiking details: we hiked in using the South Kaibab trail.  While the least pretty in my opinion, this trail has the most stereotypically "Grand Canyon" views, and it's certainly not ugly.  At the Colorado River (i.e. the bottom) we picked up the North Kaibab trail to Cottonwood where we camped the first night.  That was a 14 mile day.  WARNING: the 3 or so miles south of Cottonwood are at low elevation and consist of extremely hot, dry, and exposed desert with essentially zero shade.  Hitting this stretch mid-late afternoon in 100+ degrees with 35 lb packs was brutal.  Plan better than this!  The second day we continued on North Kaibab trail 7 miles up to the North Rim where we spent the night.  The stretch 2-3 miles from the top was the steepest part of the entire trip.  On day three we hiked the entire length of the North Kaibab trail back down to Bright Angel campground.  The entire 14 miles were downhill, the first 7 or so of them really quite steep.  I was on the verge of tears over how badly my toes hurt by the end of this.  On the last day we hiked 10 miles up Bright Angel trail to the South Rim.  Bright Angel is far less steep than South Kaibab and we make remarkably good time.  This is the prettiest of the corridor trails in my opinion (unfortunately it's also the most popular - the couple of miles closest to the rim were crowded and annoying, not to mention my entire body hurt by that point).

Some people I talked to before we left thought we were crazy going with this itinerary - and there were some points during the trip when I thought we were too - but we met a ton of people with far crazier plans.  An astonishing number of people attempt to hike rim-to-rim in a single day.  Granted this is a lot easier to do with a 10 lb day pack rather than a 35 lb multi-day pack, but still insane.  We even met 2 guys who were attempting to do rim-to-rim-to rim in 24 hours.  They did crazy things like put a packet of ramen noodles in a ziplock of water and then strap it to the outside of their packs to "cook" in the heat and sun while they hiked.  The majority of people who get med-evac-ed out of the canyon are young, healthy people who try to do too much.  We saw one such guy being loaded into a helicopter on a stretcher as we were getting into Bright Angel.

Anyways, enough of the depressing/scary talk.  It was a great trip, and I'm immensely proud of accomplishing that hike.  Time for a photo recap:

Plus food made about 35 lbs...Roughly 10 of which were water.  Such a shame that it really was necessary to carry that much for some parts of the hike.

From the South Rim, just before sunset

The NPS has some pretty awesome signage.

Looking west from South Kaibab trail

From South Kaibab trail

South Kaibab trail

Switchbacks on South Kaibab Trail

Bridge over the Colorado River

Supai Tunnel, North Kaibab trail

View from North Kaibab trail

Rainbow rocks on the North Kaibab trail.  The zoom on this shot makes that rim look so much closer than it was...still about 3 miles away at this point...

Colorado River

More awesome signage.  Don't feed the squirrels!

Bright Angel trail

Bright Angel trail

Crater Lake National Park

While I was up in Oregon visiting Angie and Tony, we went down to Crater Lake National Park for a couple days.

The blue color of the water in these photos is true.  It really is that perfect, brilliant blue.  It's amazing.  We hiked up Mt. Scott, the tallest peak in the part, with great 360 degree views, which obviously include the lake.

Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States, and precipitation (and snow melt) is its sole source of water.  There are no streams or rivers that flow in or out of the lake.

 

 

These people were hilarious.  We pulled off at one of the lookouts over the lake and found them.  I know the picture's not great, I was trying to be inconspicuous.  They've got stuffed animals lined up on the wall and they're taking pictures of them in front of the lake.  Really.  We convinced ourselves that this must be some project for the amusement of their grandchildren.  Because what other plausible and not totally bizarre reason could there be?  But no, a few minutes later we overheard them telling somebody they were taking pictures for their annual calendar...

Almost Like Fall

Flagstaff was lovely and lots of fun. The weather was perfect - just about 80 degrees in the afternoon and mid 40s overnight, a perfect breeze, and a wee bit of rain - and there was lots of time spent cooking or just lazing around.

Even the 3 1/2 hour drive up was fun - E and I were highly entertained by J's "data collection" for efforts to find me the perfect boyfriend. As J put it, "We're trying to match Anne on 22 levels of J's compatibility." This mostly consisted of J asking a series of questions and me answering. Sometimes the questions were accompanied by "scenarios" for clarification. The funniest questions were probably the ones for which J needed me to further explain my answer. At some point E and I were puzzled as to in what sort of order these questions were meant to be, to which J replied, "We're taking a top-down approach to finding a boyfriend." My comment? It's like proteomics! E thought the funniest part was my reaction to the boxer/briefs question, and I'm not going to elaborate other than to say man-thigh is not attractive! I'm not sure what he's going to do with all the information he collected. He claims he's going to find my a boyfriend (what I requested for my birthday), but I'm assuming that if he actually knew anybody suitable to introduce me to that he would have already done so.

Saturday after biscuits and gravy for breakfast we wandered around Coconino National Forest and Sunrise Crater National Monument. It was cool to go from pine forest to volcanic crater to open desert within about a 30 minute drive.


On the way back to E's parents' cabin we saw the most amazing rainbow I've ever seen. A double rainbow, where you could see the entire arc of both rainbows. It was crazy. Unfortunately I wasn't far enough back and my lens isn't a wide enough angle to catch the whole thing.


E's mom made another feast for dinner - ribs, baked beans, and cole slaw. E and I made this caramelized onion focaccia that I've been drooling over ever since I found the recipe months ago. It was delicious, and actually quite healthy - no eggs or butter in it.


Sunday morning I went for a run, and didn't die nearly as badly as I thought I would running at 6800 ft. And I'm glad I ran, because the feasting continued with a delicious pancake breakfast. We pretty much spent the rest of the day lounging around and baking. We made a ton of cookies and apple tarts. I was super excited to discover my favorite apples were in season (honeycrisp!), so I think there may be lots of apple dishes in my near future...

In all it was super nice to get away for a bit and not think about school. It's even cooled off a bit in Tucson. This morning was the first time in probably 9 months that I was chilly walking to school in a tank top. C'mon fall! You can do it! Come to Tucson!

Wasson Peak

Sunday morning I hiked Wasson Peak, the highest peak in the western division of Saguaro National Park, with my friend Colleen. (Fun Fact: Saguaro National Park is the only national park with two districts (one on either side of Tucson).)

It's generally considered a winter hike, as it's still only about 4600 ft at the peak, so the entire hike is really quite hot. Since the national park system was having a fee-free weekend, we decided to go for it anyways, and just start pretty early. It's a good, moderate hike - ~ 7 miles round trip with about 1700 ft elevation gain and a cool 360 degree view of the greater Tucson area.

You can tell how much rain we've had lately by how green the ocatillos are...

Red Rocks of Sedona

Last weekend I went up to Sedona to see my aunt and her family who are vacationing in northern Arizona for the week. The town of Sedona is pretty much like a western version of Cape Cod - super cheesy and touristy but beautiful when you get away from town. Unfortunate it rained pretty much the entire weekend, so we didn't get to do one of the things I wanted to do (Slide Rock State Park), but on the upside it wasn't 100 degrees out and we did some things I otherwise wouldn't have thought to do (Riordon Mansion in Flagstaff). Despite all the grief my uncle gave me over the weather - hey, I told them to bring rain jackets because it's monsoon season - it was really great to see some family since I only see my immediate family about twice a year and extended family on my mom's side maybe once a year.

We did a light hike in Red Rock State Park. The rocks around Sedona really are red. Sorry my pictures are all fairly crappy - the perpetually gray, rainy, cloudy weather wasn't so awesome for getting good photos with realistic color.


Even though this is from the "ghost" town of Jerome, an amusing reminder that Arizona still is the "wild west" in a lot of ways...


P.S. All the links are to Google image searches, the websites for the Arizona state park system are terrible. They look like some 4th grader made them in the mid-90s.

Wedding in the Woods

I went to wedding #3 of the year this past weekend. My old roommate, Lisa, married Joe in a seemingly random little clearing in Sitgreaves National Forest. The wedding was lovely and laid-back, much like Lisa and Joe, and it was super nice to have an excuse to go up to the mountains to escape the heat in Tucson.

My roommate Liz has been living in and working near Alpine, which is only about an hour away from the wedding site, so I drove the 5+ hours up to Alpine on Thursday night so I could hang out with her Friday. All last week it kept feeling like it should rain in Tucson, but tragically we haven't had any monsoons yet in town, so it's still been ridiculously hot (105-ish) plus the humidity normally associated with monsoons. Even though driving windy, hilly roads sucks in the rain, I was definitely glad to hit it. Rain is always welcome relief from the heat out here. The rain wasn't nearly as bad as I've seen past summers, and made for some pretty awesome rainbows.


We camped Friday and Saturday nights (it must be a fun wedding if camping is a totally feasible option right??), and spent some time Saturday wandering around the area. I'd never been to this part of Arizona before, and it turns out it's really pretty.


The wedding was beautiful and simple. It was so exciting to see Lisa and Joe get married. They went on their first date about a month after I moved in with Lisa (and other roommates, including 2 of my 3 current ones), and while I've been happy for all of my friends who've gotten married this year, there's something really neat and awesome about witnessing the relationship from the beginning. I guess it's reassuring to think that that random first date really could be with Mr. Right and lead to marriage.


As I mentioned, the wedding itself was in the middle of the national forest. Nobody would have found this on their own, so everybody met at the reception site and caravan-ed up to the site. It was quite funny to see all the guests traipsing through the woods like some strange renaissance procession.


At dinner those of us from the old house sat with a friend of Lisa's from JVC and one of her friends. They were super nice and fun to talk with, and conversation was definitely not lacking. But at some point we all overheard the funniest off-the-wall remark, and we all instantly looked at each other intrigued. One of Joe's brother's was at the next table, and said that apparently if you drink 40 non-alcoholic beers that you would blow a 0.08, making you legally drunk. Pretty quickly we started to ponder the feasibility of this, our first thought being simply with the time it would take you to consume 40 beverages your body would have certainly started processing any alcohol. Then we wondered if you even could drink 40 beers. The beers we had in front of us were 12 oz...with some rough conversions we realized that 40 12-oz beers would be nearly 4 gallons. Even if 40 non-alcoholic beers contain enough alcohol to make you legally drunk, you'd never actually be able to consume that volume. Amusing idea, but (sadly?) not feasible...

At the reception Lisa's friends from college sang her a song by the Old 97's - a band I guess she introduced them to. This song is super sweet and I may or may not have listened to it on repeat today...

On the drive home, I pulled over in Salt River Canyon a couple of times to snap some photos. The canyon is pretty impressive, and the very slow, very windy drive was much more interesting during my daytime drive home than my nighttime drive up. Crazy that this view is only about an hour and change from the lush green of the forest.

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...

Oh Coolio. Gangsta's Paradise is one of the coolest songs ever, and Death Valley is one of the coolest places ever. Picture recap:

Sunrise over Zabriskie Point


Salt flats at Badwater - looks rather like snow doesn't it?


Sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells