our second death march of the year

you know, i really think aaron and a are destined for these kinds of "eventful"trips. there is nothing particularly wrong with this, really. it's just amazing how we always have a good story to tell. (sounds like i'm talking about trips we took with dad growing up....hmm, interesting. guess i haven't learned to avoid the overzealous).

we took a trip to capitol reef national park the weekend after school ended. it was my turn to pick the destination so I whipped open the trail book and fulfilled my assignment. the drive took us through THE most amazing view on highway 24 and just pass the visitor's center we turned south and began the 30 mile drive to the trail head.

we didn't make it to the trail head before nightfall and so we parked off the road (you can see it in the background) and spent the beautiful starry night in our new $25 dollar REI brand tent (good find love!).

searching for trail markers and signs, our guide across the confusing desert ended up being a set of single human tracks. after an arduous and hot hike, which lasted much longer than the anticipated 5 miles, the tracks led us into a canyon that seemed much like the canyon described in the book.

the canyon walls deepened and my doubt that we had found the right canyon deepened as well.

the book described the canyon as one used by pioneers and their wagons...

the foot tracks disappeared and the canyon got skinnier and higher. we were both soon convinced this was not the right place. the sun began dipping behind the horizon, the air was cooling and the sky was dimming. i began losing control of my maintained emotions and admitted i was afraid we were lost and the farther we went....well, the farther we would be from where anyone could find us.

at the top of the canyon, aaron made a great find.

it was an un-boarded mine shaft. thanks to my husband's intelligence, his curiosity only led him to take the picture and not descend into the abyss. and again, thanks to my husband's adventurousness he continued to lead us in the direction that the he deemed best to find us an alternate route out of the canyon and back to the wash.

the picture below was taken the next morning, so it is nice and bright and we were rested and hopeful about finding a way out. however, the few hours before we found our campsite did not exhibit such cheerful memories. we descended into this narrow wash from the hill behind the tent in the small dip in the horizon toward the right side. to give the reader an idea of the distance, it was roughly at that dip that aaron stepped off a boulder and twisted his ankle. being already emotional, i probably went into a greater shock than he did. it took us a few hours to get down to the tent from the top of the hill and it wasn't just half an hour before the sun was gone.

the following morning we scoured the trail for signs of life and after a sufficient amount of coyote tracks and dung, we found the first human tracks. we knew we had found the way out. as you can see in the picture below, our smiles were finally heart felt.

and so we hiked the roughly 8 miles back out to the car, mind you, aaron did this on his sprained ankle. the details of how we got lost and the links of canyons that we ended up hiking would make this story confusingly longer than it already is. suffice it to say, we made an innocent and very simple mistake. so, aaron helped our future traversees and put up some good cairns.

this was the ankle when we arrived at the car.

this was the motivation to help aaron keep going on that busted ankle.

and this is the storm that hit within hours after we had gotten to our car. it was snowing and windy and freezing cold.

when we arrived back at the visitor's center, we came to find out that one of the ranger's knew exactly where we had gone. he and his wife had taken it upon themselves to investigate every canyon along that great wash. he had seen the mine and knew the nameless canyon. however, he and his wife did not make the few miles of cross country to drop back down into the neighboring canyon such as we had done. needless to say, knowing that there had been recent hikers there before decreased my post-traumatic syndrome and allows me to tell this tale today.

and there is our story.