Grand Canyon 2003 (Day 2)
Cheryl and Randy and Rhonda's Kanab Creek adventure, May 23 - June 1, 2003
Sunday, May 25, 2003
We awake from a pretty warm night of sleep...slept on top of the sleeping bags all night.
After a quick coffee/mocha fix and a delicious breakfast of granola bars, we were off to the junction of Jumpup and Kanab Creek.
Kanab - Jumpup Junction
There was no water at the Kanab-Jumpup junction, but we did pass a couple of muddy, yucky pools of stagnant water in the streambed as we hiked the 4 miles to the flowing water.
There were fresh signs of beaver right away as the water began to flow, and a tree (quite large in diameter) that they'd been working on...they had it girdled and gnawed about 3/4 of the way through.
Beginning of permanent water in Kanab Creek
A mile or so after the permanent water, we arrived at Showerbath Spring, which was named by William Powell as they exited the Grand Canyon on their second expedition in 1868.
Showerbath spring was wonderful! Rhonda didn't know whether to shower or to bath, so she did both :-)
There were a few monkeyflowers, but not as many as I'd hoped to see.
Mouseover to listen to Showerbath Spring
Monkeyflower
After a nice rest at Showerbath Spring, we continued working our way downstream, picking our way around a few large boulders and sometimes the walking was easier right in the creek.
We arrived at the junction of what some of the guidebooks call Scotty's Hollow, and had lunch. Even though it was getting pretty hot, the water walking was keeping us fairly cool and we felt good to continue, so we decided (bad decision) to keep pressing forward to Scotty's Castle. We should have waited. The next section was pretty slow going, as there were a number of large boulders that we needed to climb up and around, and in the heat Rhonda got pretty wilted. Two of us dropped packs and sat in the stream for a while, ate salty treats and tanked up on water. We were pretty exhausted by the time we caught up with Randy at the castle...it was just toooo hot to be scrambling around on those rocks with full packs in the afternoon oven. Lesson learned, we made sure to STOP mid-day from then on.
Dinner tonight was Randy's Mac 'n Cheese dinner with a spicy turkey loaf that Cheryl had cooked and then dehydrated. For all our dinners, we used the 'bring it to a boil then incubate it' method, where we placed the covered pot inside of a tee-shirt lined closed cell foam pad set up. It worked great, and we ended up using less than half the fuel we normally would have on a week-long trip.
Hiking along Kanab Creek
