Paria Canyon

This past weekend, Kirk and I had an experience of a lifetime. We went on a three day backpacking adventure with my parents, my brothers, Chris and Kevin, and Kevin's friend Jared, through Paria Canyon. We left early Thursday morning, around 4:00AM, and drove up about 30 miles north of Page, AZ to start our hike at Wire Pass.

This was our first backpacking adventure. For the past several months we had been researching and buying all the perfect backpacking equipment. The main qualifications for this equipment was that it was as light as possible. Still, when I went to put on my 30 lb. pack Thursday, I sincerely thought I might die on this trip.
Paria Canyon is beautiful! It was like hiking through an Arizona Highways magazine! The first day we hiked through some pretty skinny slot canyons. In some places you had to go sideways or take off our packs to get through. The beautiful red rock walls seemed to go up forever on both sides. I kept telling Kirk to take pictures every 20 feet, it was just so beautiful!

This was a huge arch of stone. Just to put it in perspective, the speck on the left side is a guy.

There were tons of petroglyphs on the walls. We liked to try and make up a story to go along.

My parents were amazing on this trip! They led the way a lot of the time, and kept encouraging us when it got hard.

**That's the 'poo bag' my dad is carrying. There was a rule that you had to pack out everything - yes, even your poo. This was a source of many great conversations, making 'poo bag' one of the most used phrases of the trip.

It was fun to meet up with my brother Chris, for this hike. He lives in Utah, and we can't seem to talk him in to moving back to the hot desert, so we'll just have to settle for meeting in the middle to hike every once and a while.

Poor Kevin has not one ounce of fat on his body. By the end of the second day, he had huge blisters on his hip bones from his hip belt of his pack. Because of this the song "My Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira became the theme song for the hike.

My dad had warned us that at the end of the first day there would be what are called "cesspools", or pools of really thick mud, that we had to wade through. Some were ankle deep, while others were all the way up to our thighs.

Here is part of the crew after our first day of hiking about 8.5 miles. We camped up on this rock ledge and ate our freeze dried dinners - yum!

Our tents were perilously close to the edge. We were nervous that Chris might go out onto the sunroom of his tent and fall off the mountain. (We teased Chris because his tent was the biggest and he was the only one sleeping in it.)

Here are my muddy socks after they had dried, making them stiff as a board. People coming into Jones cleaners with their Wranglers would have been jealous.

The second day was more of the same. The beauty of the canyon walls was still breathtaking.

We found bits and pieces of what we think was a bobcat.

Here's most of the crew resting. Notice the mud up to everyone's knees.

This is where we set up camp at the end of the second day. Everyone wanted 'prom' pictures to prove we made it.

Here's Jared, or J-wow as we called him, collecting water for us to drink. Seriously. I was more than a little skeptical, but once it went through the water purifier it was clear, clean, and delicious.

Here we are heading off the third day.

We basically crisscrossed the Paria River the whole rest of the hike. We figured we probably crossed the river somewhere around 75-100 times.

After walking through this all day, no wonder I got blisters on my feet.

The scenery was amazing! We took a million pictures and they just don't do it justice.

We made it! It was an amazing 23 mile, three day adventure! We decided that we'll definitely have to take our kids when they're teenagers to make them appreciate nature. When we got home late Saturday night, my leg muscles were done in, and I could barely make it up the stairs. But Sunday we had a Mother's Day miracle, and I felt as good as new.