I couldn’t bring myself to abandon a perfectly good Havasupai camping permit.

Lately some longtime friends and I have been doing annual hiking trips, and this year we considered visiting Havasupai, a remote Native American community that borders the south rim of the Grand Canyon.  Back in January we entered a lottery for the tough-to-get camping permits, and I won the option of booking a three-night reservation for five people in mid-October.

Ultimately our group chose to hike the Teton Crest Trail instead, and I could have just declined the Havasupai permit.  But why not do both?  The other Teton Crest guys didn’t have time for Havasupai too, unfortunately, which meant I needed to recruit a new team.

Marie was an easy sell.  She and I had already been to Havasupai twice (in 2012 and 2018), and she loved it as much as I did.  “Why don’t we invite Aidan?” I suggested.  Marie’s son Aidan, currently stationed in Spokane with the Air Force, would be a great addition.  Aidan agreed and said he’d bring a buddy along with him.  That just left one spot.

“Do you think Chris would be up for this?” I asked Marie.  Our mutual friend Chris, who we worked with two decades (!) ago, had grown increasingly outdoorsy over the years and seemed like a good fit for this trip.  Chris and Aidan had met before, way back when Aidan was a little kid and went with Marie to her office.  They stopped by to say hello to Chris, and Aidan remembers noticing that on his otherwise-businesslike desk Chris had a line of miniature figurines he’d crafted from red cheese wax.  That small display of quirkiness made a lasting impression.  I think Aidan must have sensed a kindred spirit.

I texted Chris a short explanation of the Havasupai situation.  “Any interest in meeting us there?” I asked.

Chris responded immediately.  “OMG.  Checking calendar.”  He noted that he’d have to make sure someone would be available to watch his daughter, but that he would have plenty of time to figure it out.  “IN,” he confirmed.  “Grateful and honored to be included.”

We had our team!

A team of four, it turned out.  Aidan’s buddy wasn’t able to go and we couldn’t find a replacement in time.  I did, however, manage to resell the extra permit spot on an exchange managed by the Havasupai tribe, so it didn’t go to waste.

Marie and I started our trip with the day-long drive from Silver Gate to Denver, where we planned to leave our little Maltese to be spoiled by my mom while we were gone.  Thanks to lucky timing, we happened to be in Denver when my niece Elizabeth’s daughter Addie turned four, and we had fun helping Addie celebrate at one of her (many) birthday parties.

 

 

 

 

From Denver we drove to Las Vegas, where Marie had booked us a room at Fontainebleau, a hotel on the strip that A) I’d never heard of before, and B) had a name I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, pronounce.  My hiking-in-the-wilderness mindset was definitely not ready to be trapped inside a gilded, soulless Vegas hotel that seemingly had no exits, and I was relieved when the next morning finally arrived.

We planned to pick up Aidan at the Vegas airport that morning, but his flight was delayed until late afternoon.  Chris, fortunately, had just flown into Vegas and rented a car, which meant that he and I could make the three-hour drive to Seligman, Arizona to pick up our camping permits before the tribe’s office closed at 6pm.  Marie would wait for Aidan and then join us.

Our full team didn’t unite until after dark that night on the slightly spooky grounds of the Grand Canyon Caverns & Inn, which had the singular benefit of being the closest hotel to the start of our hike.  We rose before sunrise the next morning, ate a quick breakfast, and drove about an hour to the Havasupai trailhead parking lot.

 

 

The first mile of the hike took us down steep switchbacks into a desolately beautiful red rock canyon.  From there the trail flattened to a more gradual descent and eventually reached Havasu Creek, the area’s heart and defining feature.  The creek, fed mostly by an underground spring rich in calcium carbonate, has a distinctive turquoise color that inspired the name of the local Native American tribe (Havasupai means “people of the blue-green water”).

 

 

 

Eight miles from the trailhead we arrived in Supai, one of the only towns in the contiguous United States that isn’t reachable by road.  Supai is small, with only a few hundred residents.  There’s a cafe, a general store, a single lodge, a helipad, and a post office that still uses mules to carry the mail.  We stopped at the cafe for lunch and then – groaning as we shouldered our heavy packs again – continued on to the camping area.

Two miles later we had our first view of Havasu Falls.  It may not be the tallest of Havasupai’s waterfalls, but it’s the most beautiful, and I love that it never looks exactly the same.  Every flood alters it, sometimes majorly, other times subtly.

 

 

The camping area began just past Havasu Falls, and without having to walk much farther we found a nice spot – plenty of flat ground, close (but not too close) to the composting toilets, not far from the drinking water spring, with a good view of the creek.  We set up our tents and hung our hammocks.

 

 

I’d been looking forward to this moment.  Both Aidan and Chris are hammock aficionados, and I knew it would be fun to see Chris, the savvy veteran, and Aidan, the promising young buck, assess each other’s hammock game.  As anticipated, there was a high degree of mutual respect.  “Oh man that’s pro,” Chris commented as he admired Aidan’s hammocking.  “That’s so pro.”

 

 

Aidan’s hammock, unfortunately, couldn’t handle some of his more acrobatic maneuvers and soon suffered a terminal rupture that knocked it out for the remainder of our trip.  Seeking new horizons, Aidan assembled a broom from random sticks and branches and gave the area around his tent a thorough sweeping.

 

 

We slept reasonably well and woke up before dawn.  After coffee and breakfast, as soon as there was enough light, we headed out for the hike to Beaver Falls.  Just past the camping area we had a gut-check at Mooney Falls, the tallest of Havasu Creek’s waterfalls.  Getting to the base of Mooney Falls and continuing down the canyon requires an alarmingly steep descent, nearly vertical in some spots.  When Marie and I climbed down in 2012, she vowed, “I’m glad I did that but I’ll never do it again.”  Now, 13 years later, she summoned the courage to give it one more go after all, and the four of us took the plunge.  Chains had been installed in some places to provide handholds, but they were frigid and slippery from the spray of the waterfall.  We tried not to think about what would happen if we lost our grip.  Aidan ratcheted up the difficulty level by carrying a mug of scalding hot tea with him.

 

 

 

The stretch between Mooney Falls and Beaver Falls is a wonderland of pale blue-green water cascading over countless travertine terraces.  I’ve never been able to do it justice with photos.  The trail crosses the creek repeatedly and sometimes takes you up and down rickety ladders that have been jury-rigged into the canyon walls.  At one point Chris spotted a bighorn sheep ewe and lamb watching us from a rocky shelf.

 

 

 

 

 

Eventually we came to a series of waterfalls that other hikers identified as Beaver Falls but clearly wasn’t.  Aidan and I kept going to the real Beaver Falls, where we watched a group of young hikers leap into the water from a frighteningly high cliff.

 

 

 

From there we returned to “fake” Beaver Falls.  Chris decided to head downstream and find a nice place to set up his hammock, while Marie, Aidan and I hiked back to our campsite and then continued on to the cafe for an early dinner.  Sore and worn out, we spent most of the next day resting and relaxing at Havasu Falls and our campsite.

 

 

 

 

Our plan for our final day was to hit the cafe as soon as it opened at 8am for a big breakfast before powering through the 8-mile uphill slog from Supai to the trailhead.  Chris was a little more ambitious.  He would be staying in Las Vegas that night before returning home the following morning, and – hoping to maximize his Vegas time – he decided to hike out in the pre-dawn dark.  We said our goodbyes in the red light of our headlamps and felt sad to see Chris go.  He’d been just the right person to join us and it was awesome to catch up.

The weather was relatively mild that morning, making the hike easier, and Marie and I reached the trailhead parking lot by midday.  Aidan, who initially set a blistering pace, eventually ran out of gas and struggled with the final mile of steep switchbacks.  We were all relieved that the rest of our day would be spent in a car, sitting instead of hiking.

 

 

Chris may have been heading home, but Aidan, Marie and I had more destinations on our agenda.  The three of us spent that night at an airbnb just outside of Zion National Park, and early the next morning we rode the park’s first shuttle of the day to the trailhead for the Narrows, one of my favorite hikes in the entire United States.  Marie and I had been there many times before, but this would be Aidan’s first visit.

As usual, I wanted to be the first to enter the Narrows so we could have it to ourselves for a while, which meant we had to race from the shuttle stop to the point where the Virgin River itself becomes the trail.  The air was cold, only a little above freezing, and the icy water was murky from rainstorms earlier in the week.

 

 

A little way into the hike Marie turned back.  We’d both picked up a cold just before Havasupai, and it was really hitting us that morning.  Aidan and I continued on to the Wall Street area, where the river is bounded on both sides by spectacularly dramatic sandstone cliffs, towering so high and so vertically that the visible sky is no more than a thin ribbon of blue.  On the way back we passed hordes of tourists, literally hundreds of them, almost every single one fully geared up in special dry suits and water shoes rented from local outfitters.  Aidan and I felt tough in our shorts and sandals.

 

 

 

 

That afternoon we made the obligatory stop at my favorite tree, a lone pine on the east side of Zion that juts out defiantly from a pile of orange sandstone.  We’d originally planned to camp in Zion that night, but I succumbed to the lure of a hot shower and a real bed at a hotel in Kanab, Utah.  The next morning we made the short drive to Page, Arizona.

 

 

 

Before the trip we’d failed to win a permit to hike to The Wave, an iconic sandstone formation near Kanab, which meant that we had time to honor a long-running joke with Aidan.  Many years ago, when Aidan was a teenager, he asked one day, all excited, “Rob have you heard about Gazelle Valley?!”  I told him I hadn’t, which he couldn’t believe.  “It’s this amazing place,” he said.  “You should go photograph it someday!”

It took a few follow-up questions and a little digging, but Marie and I eventually realized that Aidan was talking about Antelope Canyon, a famously photogenic slot canyon on Navajo land near Page.  I made my first visit there in 2006 and returned often over the years.  Marie and I, naturally, started referring to Antelope Canyon as Gazelle Valley from then on.

 

 

So it felt very appropriate for Aidan, Marie and me to visit Gazelle Valley together.  I was surprised to learn that the Navajo Nation had changed some of their visitation rules since I was there last.  Tripods are completely banned, they no longer offer special tours for photographers, and all traffic through the canyon only goes one-way.  It definitely streamlines the process, but it also makes it challenging to get high-quality photos.  Regardless, Gazelle Valley was as stunning as ever, and Aidan was appropriately impressed.

 

 

 

 

From Gazelle Valley we made a quick stop at Horseshoe Bend and then began our drive back to my mom’s place (including a U-turn to retrieve the purse Marie left at a Taco Bell in Page).  In Denver Aidan had a chance to play with Elizabeth’s kids, who he of course charmed immediately, and the next morning Marie and I dropped him off at the airport on our way back to Silver Gate.  We were really grateful to have had so much time with Aidan, who we don’t get to see as much as we’d like.

 

 

The trip had exceeded our expectations, but – as always – it felt great to be home.  I spent the rest of the month looking for wildlife and recovering from my frustratingly stubborn cold.  On the last two days of October, right before Yellowstone closed the interior roads, I joined my friends Nick, Jort and Todd for some solid Great Gray Owl time, and we managed to spot an ermine that had been making regular appearances by Mud Volcano.  It was a perfect way to welcome the beginning of winter here in Montana.