Crevice Hike

When asked at the end of the week what the students' favorite thing was, "THE CREVICE HIKE!" got the unanimous vote.  This was a hike I had done 16 years ago and one of the things I was most looking forward to revisiting on this trip.  

When you hike the crevice, you battle winds blowing sand into your eyes and mouth, you walk through amazing red rock valleys, you ascend and descent steep cliffs, you have to do some "wall-sit walking" across a crack in the earth not quite a quarter of a mile long, and you end by taking a huge leap off a rock about 15 feet in the air.  You'll never get the full appreciation for how strenuous, scary, and satisfying this hike is, but here are a few pictures for a small taste...

Climbing the cliff walls required four points of contact.  The last time I did this hike, we used ropes to get up.  But, that was January and I'm thinking it was probably icy.

We made it!  You had to just approach this hike in pieces and take a moment to celebrate the achievement of getting up or down another wall.

Delia started the hike at full throttle.  I had to get her to stop leaping from cliff to cliff.

Probably the best views any hike has ever offered us!  I liked watching the people around me just take it all in.

A break to breathe and drink!

After scaling walls and climbing up, up, up, now we start to make our way down again.

And here we enter the crevice.  Now, the best way to get across the crevice is to put your back on one side and your feet on the other and shimmy across.  But, let me say that if you were to fall or just not want to do this (like Ella and Delia), you could also just let yourself down a ways and walk through the crevice.  People like Grandma should know that there was never any danger of falling into a crack in the earth and disappearing! :)

This is my favorite picture of the trip. It's a group shot.  Most of these students have already made their way through and out of the crevice, a few of us are literally still hanging off the walls of it!

And this is how you get out: embrace your inner Spiderman, say a prayer, and take a leap.  Phil stood at the bottom to help catch us.

By the end of this hike, my girls were definitely done!  They will tell you the crevice was NOT their favorite part of the trip.  It was interesting to watch all the different reactions to the elements of this this hike.  Some love, love, loved it.  Some conquered it with tears and shaky legs.  Some even asked to come back the next day and do it all over again.  Many of us left it with achy muscles, scratches from the rocks, and bruises.  It's the kind of thing that makes our students jokingly yell, "CREVICE!  YOLO!"  and gives us each a huge sense of accomplishment.  We're super proud of our girls and our group for being willing to tackle this big hike!