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Havasupai - Part 1
I got home from my Havasupai trip, today, which has been a long time in coming. Havasupai is a Native American reservation in Arizona that contains a swimming hole oasis in the middle of the desert. It is home to the Havasupai tribe and is located in Havasu Canyon, an offshoot of the Grand Canyon. The swimming holes are found along Havasu Creek, which plunges over six major waterfalls (including the iconic Havasu Falls) before flowing into the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon proper. The main allure of Havasupai is the beauty of the turquoise-colored water and lush green vegetation juxtaposed with the rusty backdrop of a rugged desert canyon. The water is blue because it contains dissolved lime and calcium carbonate, which precipitate on everything in the water, creating exquisite travertine rims on the cascades in the creek, and creating travertine cliffs that look like massive rust-colored drip castles in the waterfall spray zones.I can’t remember when I first heard about Havasupai, but I think it was in the early-to-mid 2000’s, back before the days of #bucketlist hashtags and social media virality. I believe I first discovered it by seeing a postcard of Havasu Falls, or an early-2000’s quality jpeg of a postcard of Havasu Falls on the internet. Getting there requires an eight-mile backpacking trek down into the canyon to the village of Supai (only accessible by foot, horseback, or helicopter), which features a lodge, café, and general store. You can either stay at the Havasupai Lodge in town, or continue another 2-3 miles and camp at the campground just downstream of Havasu Falls. This seemed far too intimidating to my younger self, so I never seriously entertained the idea of actually going. Nevertheless, I often had dreams (in the literal sense) about going there, or going to similar desert swimming holes.
Fast forward to February 2015. I had become a little stir-crazy after three years of grad school and another three years of jobs with no paid time off. On top of that, I had lost two family members to cancer in the past year, which caused me to reflect on the things I wanted to accomplish before I die. I definitely wanted to devote more time to enjoying life in general, but nothing specific really came to mind... except Havasupai. I had been telling myself for years that I am going to go there at some point in my life. After all the death and disease in 2014, I realized, what was I waiting for? I was still young, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t die or become physically disabled at any time. Havasupai was probably my one major aspiration, and now I felt like I was racing some sort of clock to go there before I was no longer able to (as overly worrisome as that may seem). I spent three days in late February 2015 researching all aspects of the trip, coming up with an itinerary, and lining up a travel buddy (my friend Cade from Mississippi, who at that time hadn’t been on any major trips with me), which all made it seem promising.
Entry to the reservation requires a permit, which you can only get if you are camping or staying at the lodge. They don’t have a website, so the only way to book or check availability is by phone. I had to call the lodge five times before someone answered, and they said they were completely booked through the end of June. I had been planning to go in April or May, since that seemed like the best tradeoff between warm (but not excessive) temperatures and a low chance of rain. In researching the trip, I had read that you usually have to book six months in advance (and this info was from before social media “top ten places you must visit” lists were in full swing), so I wasn’t exactly surprised that they were already booked up that spring. Still, I was kind of disappointed that it didn’t pan out. I neglected to book for later in the year, because monsoon season starts in July and lasts until early September, so you ran the risk of a rainstorm muddying up the blue water (which is kind of the selling point) for the duration of your stay, not to mention the danger of flash flooding. I’d be pretty bummed if I blew $1000 to travel there and the water was muddy. I’m sure the waterfalls would still be nice, but there are plenty of other places to see nice waterfalls without blue water that are much less of a physical and financial hassle to get to.
After failing to secure a reservation for my desired time of year, I promised myself I would book in fall of 2015 for spring of 2016. I had originally planned on contacting the lodge in October, but I procrastinated until December, and they were already booked up for spring of 2016. I was getting kind of frustrated at this point, so I asked the woman on the phone about booking a campsite (despite my disdain for camping). She said that the campground doesn’t start taking reservations until February 1 of the same year, whereas the lodge starts taking reservations a year in advance. In early February of 2016, I attempted to call the tourist office to book a campsite (the lodge doesn’t deal with camping reservations). By now, I had learned the secret to getting ahold of the lodge in one or two attempts (slip me a twenty and I’ll tell you), but the tourist office was a different story. I called numerous times to no avail. I only got an answer one time, and it was a pissed-off sounding woman who said, “HABLA ESPANOL?!” a couple of times before hanging up. I had heard that the campground sells out for the whole year in only a few days anyway, so I figured 2016 was now a bust.
I decided this time that I was going to try to book farther in advance for 2017, but the lodge doesn’t start taking reservations for next year until June of the previous year. I figured eleven months in advance would be enough, so I called the lodge on July 4, 2016 to book for late May of 2017. They did have vacancies for spring this time, but only for single, non-consecutive nights, and I wanted a three-night stay (i.e., two full days in the canyon) to allow time to see everything. I was not going to strike out three years in a row, so this time I had a backup plan: if May was not feasible, then I was going to settle for late September, which has similar temperatures to May, but with a somewhat higher chance of rain. I asked if they were taking reservations for September 2017 yet, even though this was over a year in advance, and the woman said yes. I went ahead and booked September 26-29, and I finally triumphed. From this point, it was a waiting game until January of 2017. Supai's fiscal year starts in late fall or early winter, so they don’t actually process the reservations until November or December. The whole process was kind of sketchy, because they don’t have an official website or anything, so you just have to trust that the phone numbers you found on third-party websites are legit and that you aren’t giving your credit card number to some scam artist. The way the lodge works is that you pay a deposit by credit card, and they send you a confirmation letter by snail-mail (which takes a while, since all their mail is carried in and out via pack mules), and you have to bring the confirmation letter with you when you check in. I got my confirmation letter in mid-January of this year. The original plan was to book the lodge for September, and then see if we could get a campsite in May, and if so, cancel the lodge reservation. I still wasn’t too keen on camping, so I admittedly didn’t try very hard. I heard that they tried to use a third-party website for campground booking this spring, but it crashed after only a few days due to the amount of web traffic. The people who had already booked online apparently still got their reservations, though.
For the entire spring and summer, I monitored the weather forecast for Supai. The weather ended up being sort of stochastic until late May, so I was kind of glad we didn’t go earlier this spring. June looked dry, but temperatures were in the 100’s from June to August (which is typical), so lugging a backpack on an eight-mile hike would not have been pleasant. The forecasts for early September were in the high 80’s and low 90’s, usually with a 0 % chance of rain, so I was hoping this would hold up through our trip dates. In the two weeks leading up to the trip, I borrowed a proper backpacking backpack from my friend Britt (since I don’t have one of my own), and Cade and I made our peripheral reservations for flights, a rental car, and hotel rooms for the days we would fly in and fly out of Las Vegas. I spent the weekend packing as the excitement built.
It was time!
On Monday, September 25, Cade and I flew into Las Vegas. The signage coming out of the terminal pointed to “baggage claim” in one direction and “liquor store” in the other. From the airport, we rented a car and drove to Arizona. Along the way, we stopped in Kingman, AZ, the last major town before our destination. We ate at Cracker Barrel, which seemed a bit out of place out west (Cracker Barrel has always had a distinctly southeastern feel, to me). We then went to Wal-Mart and picked up some last-minute groceries, including jerky, bread, and peanut butter packets. From Kingman, we got onto Route 66 and drove through Peach Springs, AZ, the closest “town” to the Havasupai Trailhead. Peach Springs basically consisted of a motel, the Hualapai (pronounced “hu-walla-pee”) Lodge, and a gas station with a convenience store. Our motel, the Grand Canyon Caverns Inn, was about fifteen minutes past Peach Springs. We had considered the Hualapai Lodge, as it seemed to be the nicer of the two motels, but it has a railroad right behind it with frequent train traffic, and I know from experience that a motel room is worthless if you can’t actually sleep in it. The Grand Canyon Caverns Inn looked (okay, was) old and tacky (it has 50’s cars and plastic dinosaurs out front), but it was clean and semi-comfortable with no train noise, which was all we needed for a single night’s stay. It got cold after the sun went down, and the woman at the front desk said they had been having a bit of a cold snap, so she upgraded our initial reservation for a room with two double beds to a room with two queens, as those rooms had heaters.
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Day 1:
We woke up early on Tuesday morning, and the temperature was in the 40’s. We were dissatisfied with the continental breakfast options at our motel, which basically consisted of bread and fruit, so we decided to drive back to the Diamond Creek Café, which is inside the Hualapai Lodge, to get a hot breakfast. As we were walking out of the lobby at the Grand Canyon Caverns Inn, a biker approached us and asked if we were going to Havasupai. We said yes, and he asked if we had a reservation. I said we had made our reservation over a year ago. He said he didn’t have one, but he was going to try his luck getting there. He said he would offer them $200 to let him day-hike in if they tried to stop him. We had seen him talking to another group before he started talking to us, and I got the impression that he might be trying to befriend people who were going there so he could ask to piggy-back onto their reservations if he encountered them later in the day. He didn’t know that we had planned to get breakfast first, and I believe he was following us, as he followed us past the turnoff to Indian Road 18 (the road to Hualapai Hilltop: the location of the Havasupai Trailhead) and then turned around and went back.
We heard a train pass by as we were eating breakfast at the Diamond Creek Café, and it was pretty loud, so we were glad we had stayed at the other motel. I swiped a couple of jelly packets to go with the bread and peanut butter we had bought yesterday, and we topped off our gas tank and hit the road.
Indian Road 18 is a desolate road about 60 miles long that starts off through gently rolling hills/fields, winds through a forested area, and then goes through more fields.
We passed a biker coming the opposite direction, and Cade said he recognized the bike as belonging to the guy we had talked to earlier that morning. We assumed he got turned away by the rangers. As the road nears Hualapai Hilltop, the plateaus rise above the road, and it starts to get that classic Grand Canyon look. There were cars parked along the road starting almost a mile before we reached the parking lot. We were able to find a parking space right next to the trailhead. The parking lot was at the edge of the deep Hualapai Canyon.
Finally being here felt sort of surreal, with the morning light and being groggy from getting up early. I had had so many dreams about being at Havasupai (or starting along the trail and not making it to the falls before I woke up) that I was half expecting to wake up at home and have to go to work. There were composting toilets, porta-potties, a couple of vending tents, and a hut with information on it about the hike. We were asked by a couple of locals (possibly rangers) if we had reservations, and if we were camping or staying at the lodge. When we said we were at the lodge, they seemed satisfied and didn’t question us further.
We started down the trail at 9:20 AM. In the summer, some people start hiking at 4 AM to avoid the midday heat, but that was not a problem with today's cooler weather. For the first 1.5 miles, the trail switchbacks down the side of the canyon and then continues straight(ish) down the hill until it reaches the canyon floor.
We frequently had to stop and let trains of horses pass. When we were on the downhill portion after the switchbacks, one of the locals (probably a ranger) on a horse approached us and asked if we had checked in at the hilltop. We told him that they didn’t ask us for any information up there after we told them we were staying at the lodge, so he pulled out a small notebook and asked for the name that the reservation was under. After he took down my name, we continued down the trail. At the bottom of the hill, the trail follows a dry wash through the canyon for about five miles (third photo by Cade).
This portion of the trail is downhill, but at a relatively slight grade. All of the people we were passing coming from the opposite direction looked less than thrilled, and some of them would sarcastically say “you’re almost there” when we were clearly less than halfway. The main road largely consisted of fine gravel, which was annoying to walk in, but there was a narrower, more packed-down foot path in the middle of the road, and there were side trails that cut corners and allowed pedestrians to stay clear of horse traffic. The canyon got deeper and deeper until we crossed a small spring and finally reached the point where Hualapai Canyon emerges into Havasu Canyon (or Cataract Canyon, the naming schemes kind of vary among sources). I will mostly refer to landmarks as they are named in my guidebook, Exploring Havasupai: A Guide to the Heart of the Grand Canyon by Greg Witt. We got our first glimpse of the creek at this point, and we were relieved to see that the water was not muddy. It was clear and blue with green aquatic vegetation. It reminded us a lot of the Ichetucknee River in Florida, which we had visited two years ago.
From here, the trail was mostly a reddish-brown powdery sand (with flecks of dried pale green horse shit mixed in), which was annoying to walk on (it was about like trying to hike through sand at the beach). In some places, there was a hard side trail on the bank along the road. I had been doing pretty well up until we reached the creek, but this final stretch was where I started to tire out, even though this was the flattest portion of the hike. We began to see houses along the road, and we finally reached the village. We walked past the tourist office (where campers are supposed to check in), and several people told us we needed to check in. We explained that we had lodge reservations, and they told us to go straight there to check in instead of the tourist office. We checked in at the lodge, which was on the far north end of town. We reached it around 12:50 PM. Our total hike time from the hilltop to the lodge was 3 hours and 32 minutes.
I had to give the woman at the desk my confirmation letter that I had received back in January, and she took it and gave us pink tags with unique numbers on them to attach to our bags (to show that we had a reservation). We were in room 19, which was on the second floor. The room was pretty bare-bones with no amenities except for air conditioning (no phone, microwave, fridge, or anything like that). They did have wi-fi, believe it or not, but that was a town-wide thing and not specific to the lodge.
After we off-loaded most of our stuff in the room, we ate lunch at the Supai Café. I had a club sandwich and a massive plate of tater tots. Reviews of this place had complained about small portions, but I’m not exactly sure what they were talking about. Granted, Cade’s burger was a little small, but you could make a full meal out of the tots and fries without even getting an entrée.
After we ate, we continued down the trail with the intention of seeing and possibly swimming at the waterfalls closer to the village. The significant waterfalls of Havasu Creek from upstream to downstream are:
1. New Navajo Falls (aka Upper Navajo Falls)
2. Rock Falls (aka Little Navajo Falls or Lower Navajo Falls)
3. An unnamed waterfall some refer to as “Hidden Falls”
4. Havasu Falls
5. Mooney Falls
6. Beaver Falls
The three waterfalls upstream of Havasu Falls are relatively “new” waterfalls that were formed in 2008 when a catastrophic flash flood changed the course of the creek and scoured out a new creek bed, diverting water away from the original Navajo Falls (which was reportedly the most beautiful of all the falls – here’s a youtube video of it) in the process and leaving it dry... for shame! The 2008 flood also scoured a channel in the river-left side of the brink of the formerly river-wide Havasu Falls, making it a narrow tier and slightly reducing its height.
Our goal for today was to hike to Havasu Falls and also check out the waterfalls upstream of it. About a mile downstream of the village, we could see a significant drop on the horizon, and we could hear the sound of the falls echoing off the canyon walls. It sounded like a flash flood was about to pour over the side of the canyon. The main trail stayed well away from what looked like the first significant drop, and the first actual waterfall the trail passed directly was Rock Falls. I think the official name is actually Little Navajo Falls, as indicated by the signage on the trail and a poster in the café, but I prefer Rock Falls, so I’m sticking with that name. When I first saw it, I wasn’t sure which waterfall it was supposed to be, because it looked almost nothing like the Rock Falls I had seen in pictures.
The pictures and videos I had seen showed the creek dropping off a ledge into a deep pool, and the ledge jutted out far enough that people could walk behind the waterfall and jump through it into the pool below. The plunge pool was also apparently deep enough for people to jump from the top of the falls. Today, the waterfall was much wider, the water tumbled down the rocks instead of dropping off a ledge, and the pool was mostly filled with rocks and boulders. It also had a more closed-in feel than I was expecting, as the trees and reeds around the plunge pool have grown up and now block the open views seen in older pictures. This was somewhat disappointing, as Rock Falls in its former state looked like it was one of the better swimming holes. We surmised that the ledge had collapsed and the falls had eroded both back and sideways several meters in recent years, and that most of the pictures of this waterfall were taken in its early years when it was freshly formed (after reviewing various youtube videos from different points in time, the ledge was still standing as of September 2016, and it was collapsed in April 2017, although the falls had widened sometime prior to 2014). Videos from recent years before the collapse show a massive travertine deposit in the middle of the falls, so I'm guessing the deposit kept growing and growing until the ledge finally collapsed under its weight. One small stream of water on the far river-right portion seemed to be all that remained of the original waterfall, and the majority of the flow was now going over the collapsed portion. I think the collapse actually made the waterfall prettier, but it unfortunately ruined the plunge pool.
We were going to have to backtrack upstream on a side trail to get to New Navajo Falls, so we decided we would continue downstream for now and check it out on the way back. Shortly after Rock Falls, the trail rounded a bend and we could hear Hidden Falls below. It is actually visible from the trail, but you have to know exactly where to look (and you kind of have to stand on your tiptoes to see into the gorge, as there is a fence along the road to keep people from getting too close to the undercut edge).
Hidden Falls looked like it would require a significant detour, so we decided to save it for another day. Shortly after passing Hidden Falls, the trail began to descend.
We crossed a bridge when the trail reached creek level, and Havasu Falls was just downstream.
It was shortly after 3 PM when we got there, but the swimming hole had already lost sunlight due to the direction of the canyon in that location. The water felt pretty cold, and my thermometer said it was 63 °F, a bit chillier than the “70 °F year round” figure that most sources claim. The pool was not terribly inviting at this time of day due to the cold waterfall spray and lack of sun, but there were still quite a few people hanging out on the rims just beyond the falls.
We decided to head back upstream in search of a sunnier swimming hole. The sun was still hitting the top of Rock Falls when we got back around 3:55 PM, and some people were sunbathing on the rocks, but the pool at the bottom was mostly in shadows now. I decided to check out New Navajo Falls, so we took a side-trail along the creek that dead-ended near the base of the waterfall. This was a river-wide waterfall of about 50 feet high, and there were no good views of it from the trail. I tried to wade through a narrow passage in the reeds that lined the pool to get a better view, but this area was now in the shade, so being waist-deep in the water and getting hit with the waterfall spray was highly unpleasant. I didn’t go out into the middle of the pool, so I only got a side-view of the falls (the video below also includes additional angles filmed later in the trip).
It didn’t look like the area at the base of the falls was deep enough to be a legit swimming hole, so I turned around and waded back to shore without fully immersing myself. I got a lovely ring of pollen scum around my torso as I was wading through the reeds. Cade had no desire to get into the water, so he waited on shore the whole time.
We headed back to the lodge and took hot showers before collapsing from exhaustion. The hike to the village had been about eight miles, plus the two-mile round trip to Havasu Falls with side trail exploration, so we had probably hiked about 13 miles total. I now had tender, un-popped blisters on both my heels, and the top layer of skin on my left pinky toe had been rubbed off, so I patched these areas with moleskin and band-aids before going to bed. When I tossed and turned during the night (the beds were less than comfortable), it hurt whenever my heel blisters got pressed on. I woke up between 3 and 4 AM and couldn’t go back to sleep, since my body was still operating on Eastern Time, and Supai was essentially on Pacific Time (technically Mountain Time with no daylight savings time).
Day 2 of the trip is covered in my next entry.