The People of the Blue Water

If for some reason the power of the scenery in the canyon starts to wear off on you and it just doesn’t have the same impact that it used to, then Havasupaii Creek will snap you right our of your ungrateful funk.  The creek is famous for it’s blue-green waters and the waterfalls that are tucked back up into the side canyon that is part of the Havasupaii Native American Reservation.

We were warned by the map notes that it was a tough spot to pull off the river and was pretty easy to miss, so when I spotted it I jumped off onto a limestone ledge with the bow line and almost had my dumb ass yanked right back into the water.  You forget sometimes, but when a boat that heavy is moving, it takes a lot more than one guy on slippery rocks with a rope in hand to stop it.

Once you stop the boat you immediately see the famous water color merging with the colorado and it looks amazing.  It reminded me of my Gatorade of choice on the bike ride, Frost Glacier Freeze.

Despite the fact that we were on a completely different mission from our other hiking day, we managed to fall right into our pre determined path of scaring the shit out of ourselves. We hiked up while following the creek, criss crossing back and forth to stay on the trial until we got to a fork in the canyon. I think we milled around looking for the trail for about 45 minutes until Heath determined we needed to go up again. We all managed to scrape our way up the rocks and when it came time for John to go, you could see him in the same position I was the other day, the “seriously, why are we doing this?” position. John almost let out a man cry and when we got to safety he said “I just kept picturing myself falling back on the rock ledges below and watching my femurs shoot out through the tops of my hips.”

Well, we found the waterfalls we were looking for and clocked in a total of 6 miles in wetsuit booties. All in all, it was an unbelievable day with a landscape so odd and beautiful, it looked like a movie set. The Grand Canyon technically isn’t one of the seven wonders of the world, but it should be.