Havasu Canyon :: Day 2

The next morning after some fruit, a grilled cheese and hard-boiled eggs, we continued north along the creek about 5 miles where the blue waters of Havasu Creek meet the brown force that is the Colorado River. Being along the banks on the Grand Canyon you begin to think just how powerful and unforgiving nature can be and how everything else in life means very little at that moment. Time slowly salts away the earth and all that is in it and at that moment I felt a sense of oneness with my surroundings.
After a brief stay at the Colorado River, we made our way back to our camp at Beaver Falls. We decided to head back to where we had stayed the first night outside of Supai to give ourselves a head start on the trek back to the car the following morning. After making the climb back up Mooney Falls through the miner's tunnel, we refilled our CamelBacks and Nalgenes at a spring and headed towards the village of Supai. As we walked through the village, the sun was setting and local people were returning to their homes for the night. I passed by a small boy and said "what's up little man?" He didn't say anything, just laughed as he grabbed onto my pack to slow me down. The entire day had been quite an experience and I couldn't help but feel guilty as we walked through the land this tribe shared with us, the American travelers whose ancestors had done so much to destory and confine their culture to small nooks and crannies throughout America.
We made camp outside of Supai and laid our packs out underneath the stars in Northern Arizona. Around 4 a.m, I awoke to rain drops smacking me in the face and suddenly the sky that was so full of stars was black and sullen. We hadn't packed in a tent since we were in a place that might get 2 inches of total rainfall all year outside the monsoon seasn in late July. So we decided to put the tarp we were sleeping on over us to prevent being completely soaked. Just before we had left for this trip, I picked up a new sleeping back at REI. Thankfully, the guy at REI told me that to get a synthetic bag instead of one made of down if I was ever going to get wet. I ended up getting the North Face Snowshoe, its rated for 0 F/ -17 C and turned out to be a really good buy at around $200. It stayed warm even though everything in that canyon was soaked at that point and helped me make it through the night.
At first light, we picked up and headed south back to the car at Hualapai Hilltop. Along the way, I saw what I wasn't able to see on the way in at night. The once isolated and remote canyon was now filled with candy bar wrappers and gatorade bottles. How people can come to place like this and leave their trash everywhere is beyond me. We did what we could to pick things up along the way, but the entire route looked more like an alley behind a 7-11 than a giant crack in the desert in Northern Arizona. After about a 3 hour hike, we made it up the steep switchbacks back to the car and dragged our exhausted bodies to Flagstaff for some Fajitas.