Havasupai - Part 2
Sep. 30th, 2017 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flyminion
This is the second of three entries about my four-day stay in Havasupai. I covered Day 1 of the trip in my first entry.Day 2:
Our objective for Wednesday (September 27) was to hike to Beaver Falls, which is about 5-6 miles from the village. When I had booked two full days in the canyon, my intention was for one day to be a swim day, and for the other day to be the Beaver Falls hike. Since Wednesday was cool and overcast, and Thursday was supposed to be warm and sunny, I thought it would make more sense to do Beaver Falls on Wednesday and spend Thursday hanging out at swimming holes. Cade thought we should wait until Thursday to do the longer hike, since we had done so much hiking yesterday, but I didn’t want to do this hike the day before we had to hike out of Supai. My blisters were a little less intense than last night, but they were still kind of sore. I was not going to let blisters slow me down, so I was hoping they would become desensitized the more I walked on them. We got breakfast at the café, and then we headed north down the trail. On the way out of town, I stopped to take a picture of the Wigleeva, a pair of pillars that stand above the village.
According to my guidebook (Exploring Havasupai: A Guide to the Heart of the Grand Canyon by Greg Witt), the two pillars (one male and one female) stand watch over the village, and if they fall, it will mean the end of the canyon and of the Havasupai people. Kind of intense.
As the trail neared the river, I tried to get some better pictures of Rock Falls, since yesterday’s pictures were all backlit by the sun, but the trees and vegetation now blocked most of the higher vantage points seen in earlier photos. We passed Havasu Falls and continued past the point where we had stopped yesterday. The campground lies just downstream of Havasu Falls. At the entrance, there was a ranger hut and a fry bread tent, which was currently closed. We continued about a mile through the campground, which features three composting toilets. We used one of them, and I was immediately glad we were staying at the lodge, because I was not able to stay inside very long without dry-heaving from the smell. They were definitely not as nice as the composting toilets at the park where I used to work. We also passed Fern Spring, a source of potable drinking water for campers, which emerges from the rocks via a PVC pipe sticking out of the canyon wall.
At the end of the campground, we reached the top of Mooney Falls, the tallest and most epic waterfall (in my opinion) of Havasu Creek. It plunges nearly 200 feet over a cliff and into a large pool.
Believe it or not, quite a few visitors stop at Havasu Falls and don't make it to Mooney Falls, even though the latter is an easy one-mile hike past Havasu Falls. We scrambled around on the rocks at the top of the cliff, trying to find the best vantage point. From across the gorge, we could see that there was a picnic table precariously perched on the edge of the cliff near the brink of the falls. The descent to the bottom of Mooney Falls is by far the gnarliest portion of the hike. When I was younger, I was intimidated by written descriptions of it, as they basically said you had to climb down the face of the 200-foot cliff while holding onto chains and metal stakes. While that description is not inaccurate, it makes it sound a lot worse than it actually is. According to my guidebook, there had only been one recorded fatality here as of 2010, and that guy was high on speed and not using the proper route. After looking up youtube videos of people making the descent, I thought it didn’t look too bad, especially after some of the swimming hole treks I have done in recent years. The first half of the descent was a fairly straightforward series of switchbacks in the upper portion of the cliff. The switchbacks ended at the first of two manmade tunnels with rock stairs inside them. Cade went down first.
Between the two tunnels, the trail crosses a sheltered ledge about 100 feet above the creek.
The exit of the second tunnel is where the chains begin.
The first half of the chain descent was fairly easy, but the second half was very wet and slippery due to the waterfall spray (photo by Cade):
The last 30 feet or so includes three slippery wooden ladders (video by Cade):
The second ladder tipped backward a few inches when I put my weight on it. It was chained in place, so it didn’t topple, but it was a bit hair-raising. Cade and I both made it to the base of the falls unscathed.
Mooney Falls is about three miles from the lodge, so it is more or less the halfway point on the hike from the lodge to Beaver Falls, which is another three miles downstream. After Mooney Falls, the trail follows the creek through the woods and crosses it twice. At the first crossing, we encountered two guys who were looking for their friend. They said he had a blue hoodie and a camera on his back, and they didn’t think he would have crossed the creek. We said we hadn’t seen him, but we would keep a lookout. I opted to switch from my hiking boots to my Vibram toe shoes (which were much easier on my blisters), as it seemed to be impossible or at least highly inconvenient to cross the creek without getting my feet wet. Cade managed it at the first crossing, and he almost managed the second crossing, but he had to take his shoes off when he came to a makeshift log bridge that was not quite high enough above the water. After the second crossing, the trail meanders through a relatively flat field of vines.
After this, the trail went up and down along the rocks, and it also crossed a small gully about 20 feet deep via a sketchy plywood bridge (photo by Cade):
A third creek crossing put us back on the river-right side of the creek for the rest of the way. There were many scenic small cascades and pools during this portion of the hike.
The trail came to a tunnel through the dense foliage of a palm tree (or maybe a large cycad) and then climbed back up onto the rocks via wooden ladder.
Cade had commented that this section of the creek looked almost like something at Disney World, and the presence of the palm sort of completed the look. Shortly after the trail leveled off, we encountered the blue hoodie guy with the camera and told him his friends were looking for him. From here, the trail stays on the cliffs fairly high above the creek. It was a relatively short scramble along the rocks to Beaver Falls.
Beaver Falls is not a single waterfall, but a series of 5-25 foot cascades totaling about 50 feet in height, similar to Stairway Falls on the Horsepasture River in North Carolina.
The cascades on the upper portion of the falls consisted of the travertine rims typical of most of Havasu Creek’s cascades. A few meters downstream, a lower portion of the falls cascades about ten feet through a slot in the rocks and emerges into a deep pool lined with cliffs. Just downstream from this pool is Beaver Canyon, a side-canyon that meets Havasu Canyon on the river-left.
I was more interested in checking out the lower falls first, as this is the iconic swimming hole where people cliff jump. We bypassed the side-trail that goes down to the upper falls and continued walking along the relatively flat area on the cliffs above the lower pool.
There were several people there, and one woman said that her daughter had gotten down by climbing down a rope secured in place by a carabiner clipped to a stake in the rocks. There were several other people at the bottom of the cliff, and the woman said that they had taken a trail down, but they had said it was a long hike downstream. After waiting for the woman’s daughter to come back up the rope, I tried to go down, but there was one really sketchy part where I would have to climb to the side of where the rope was anchored and swing my leg around to get to the next ledge. If I lost my balance, the rope would swing to the side, since this was not directly below the anchor, and I was not confident in my ability to hold on if that happened. One slip would mean a 30-40 foot fall onto the rocks below, so I opted to just take the trail. While I had been trying the rope, Cade had been exploring the cliffs above, and he said that the trail bypassed this area a little ways uphill and continued downstream. We climbed up the hill to the trail, and we continued past the reservation boundary and crossed into Grand Canyon National Park.
We found a side trail that switch-backed down the cliffs to the creek bed, and we walked upstream through the creek to the swimming hole. We encountered a group of about 10-20 people wading upstream, and I asked one of them if they had hiked all the way to the Colorado River. They said they were rafting the Colorado, and they had hiked up Havasu Creek to this point as part of a side-trip. When we got to the swimming hole, the waterfall feeding it was a bit smaller than it looked in pictures. I thought it would be about 25 feet, but it was really only about 10 feet.
Some people had been jumping from the top of the cliff, which was way too high for me, but there was a ledge with about a 10-12 foot jump that looked ideal. I was going to go in and scope out the depth with my diving mask, but the visibility in the water was only a few feet, and the area where I tried to slide in was only about waist-deep despite appearing to be over my head (the bottoms of the pools are usually a ubiquitous solid white, which makes them look deeper than they really are). The water was pretty cold today (still 63 °F, according to my thermometer), the pool was shaded, and the current was too strong to easily scope out the jumping area, so I decided to forego jumping. Two girls from the rafting group had waded into the water, and they asked if I would go under with them. I said I would go in up to my shoulders, but I didn’t want to go all the way under. I picked my feet up and fell into the water, and I swam to the calmer river-left side of the pool. There was a rope hanging from a tree there, but it was unclear if this was a swing, or if it was just there for people to hold on to as they climbed up the rocks. The two girls had gone under the water while I was swimming around in the pool, and we all got out about the same time. The rafting group had climbed to the top of the cliff via the rope, and the two girls were going to try it.
I thought going up the rope might be easier than backtracking down the creek and hiking back up the switchbacks, but the two girls were behind me, so I offered to let them go first, since I wasn’t sure if I was actually going to do it. There was a guy from their group telling them how to get up, and it was suspenseful to watch them do it. After they went, I was still too sketched out at the point where I would have to swing my leg around. Cade didn’t want me to do it, and I wasn’t feeling confident, so I chickened out. The rafting guy at the top was telling me that it was all about swinging my leg around, but I said I would prefer to just take the trail. Cade and I waded back downstream and climbed the switchbacks back up to the main trail.
I still wanted to check out upper Beaver Falls, so we walked back to the area between the upper and lower falls and took a short side trail down to the base of the upper falls. I wanted to swim in the pool beneath the largest cascade, which was the second from the top.
One of the cascades is supposed to have a large room behind it called the Green Room, which supposedly requires swimming ten feet down and eight feet back. I didn’t try to find the Green Room due to the poor water clarity and the strong current at the base of the falls, but I did go into a small above-water grotto on the side of the falls (photo by Cade):
There were two guys there, one of whom had a tripod and was trying to photograph the falls and creek from various vantage points, so I had to get out of the water several times to get out of his shots. There was a rope on the rock wall at the river-left side of this cascade, and there was a ladder up the next cascade. Cade said he wanted to climb up these to see if they connected to the main trail, but he didn’t want to get wet. I swam across the pool, which was over my head, but I didn’t dive down to see how deep it actually was. I climbed up the rope beside the big cascade and up the ladder at the top cascade (photo by Cade):
It looked like the trail continued up the river-left side of the creek to the area where the palm/cycad was. I climbed back down and collected my backpack. There was a cool-looking tub in the middle of the bottom cascade, and I wanted to climb into it before we left, so I did (second photo by Cade):
I wished we had spent more time at the upper falls, and I regretted spending so much time at the lower falls.
It was getting close to 4 PM by this point, and we had no desire to climb back up Mooney Falls in the dark, so we decided to get going. We reached the area just downstream of Mooney Falls around 5 PM. On the way in, we had crossed several small streams that emerged from Ghost Canyon (a side-canyon on the river-left, just downstream of Mooney Falls), and the streams dropped about 20 feet over the cliffs into Havasu Creek, but we had neglected to check this out on the way in. I decided to wade up the creek to get a view of the streams dropping in. I left my hiking poles along the trail. The side cascades were pretty cool. They formed small travertine aprons and grottoes, and they had cool tubs and platforms at their bases.
Just upstream from where the side-streams spilled in was a 10-12 foot cascade in the main creek.
This area was sort of like a much cooler version of Mountain Dog on the South Yuba River in California. Cade had opted not to check this area out, but he was watching me from downstream. I had waved to him at one point, and he gave me some sort of hand signal, but I wasn’t sure what he was trying to communicate. Later, I saw him on the cliffs at the brink of the side-stream waterfalls. When I got back to the area where I had left my poles, my poles were gone and Cade was nowhere in sight. I figured he had probably taken them, but I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t want him to get too far ahead of me in case I had to go back and look for them. I ran through the woods calling his name, but he never responded. I finally caught up to him at the base of Mooney Falls, and he had my poles, much to my relief. He said he thought I was trying to signal to him that I was going to creek-walk all the way upstream to Mooney Falls when I waved to him, so he had taken my poles so I wouldn’t have to go back and get them.
Just downstream of Mooney Falls is an island in the middle of the creek, and we had not checked out the river-right side of the island on the way in. Since I still had my Vibrams on, I waded to the island to check out what was on the other side. There was a picnic table in the middle of the creek, and just downstream from this was a small cascade with an inviting pool and rope swing.
I wanted to spend some time at this area, but it was getting late, so I went ahead and crossed back to where Cade was, and we climbed back up the cliff. It was much easier (well, from a technical standpoint) going up than it was coming down (photo by Cade):
As we were walking through the campground, the light was hitting the cliffs in a way that made it easy to differentiate the immediate inner canyon wall from the outer canyon wall above it in a photograph (it’s kind of hard to differentiate in 2D with ubiquitous lighting).
The cloud above the canyon sort of looks like a dragon head, or the Phoenix from X-Men. The frybread tent at the head of the campground was open as we were passing by around 6 PM. Cade was hungry and wanted a hotdog, but they were out of hotdogs, and he only had $5 (I didn’t have any money on me). The only thing they had left that he could afford was frybread, but he wasn’t interested, so we continued onward. I stopped at the top of Rock Falls to wash my feet off and change from my Vibrams back into my hiking boots, as my feet were getting pretty tired of having no arch support.
We got back to the lodge after dark, around 7 PM (Arizona is not on daylight savings time, so this would be 8 PM in other parts of the Mountain Time Zone). We were pretty exhausted by the time we reached the home stretch of the hike, so I was relieved to finally see the dark silhouettes of the Wigleeva as we neared the village. The café was closed, so we ate some of the food we had bought at Wal-Mart on Monday. I had two PBJ’s and some beef jerky. Cade had been jonesing for some meat and was less than satisfied by this meal, but I came mentally prepared to make at least one meal out of PBJ’s. Further adding to our first-world problems, our shower was out of hot water, so we had to take cold showers. My blisters were still unpopped and had gone down somewhat, and they were basically numb to pain after today’s hike. The Vibrams probably helped with that, since I wore them for most of the hike, but the foot support was terrible, so my calves and foot arches were pretty tight. I figured my legs and feet would get somewhat of a chance to recover tomorrow, as we were planning to do less hiking and more swimming.
The rest of the trip is covered in my third and final entry.
