Finishing Up These Arizona Posts

A few weeks ago, I finished up writing about Arizona...but didn't have the final set of photos from the camera.  Now I have gone across the country just to download these photos, and I am now prepared to show them to you!

I will show you photos of the Devil's Bridge hike, and then Arizona Miscellany, and then I'll really be out of Arizona photos.

Devil's Bridge

When we hiked to Devil's Bridge, we noticed many colorful place names nearby:

We got lost, and took a special route through the backcountry.  Here's Mom on our special invented trail:

And here's the view down to the real trail below:

Here is Devil's Bridge from below.  Devil's Bridge is a natural rock bridge.

If you're feeling lucky, you walk across it!  What are the chances the rock will give away just for you?  Here I am, feeling lucky:

Dad felt lucky too:

If you look at my most recent post on Arizona, you can get links to youtube videos of people doing stupid dances and cartwheels on Devil's Bridge.

Arizona Miscellany

Flora is spiky:

 

The final red rock desktops from Sedona that you will receive from me!

Fun game: spot the spiders!

Here's an example of a hand hold that I thought rock climbing gyms just made up.  Apparently these finger-holds do exist!

 

That wraps it up for Arizona!  Next week, it's glacier hiking. 

Extreme Sport of the Week: Extreme Caving

Last week's post was long.  This one will be much shorter but it will be awesome.  There is only one picture, but stay with me here...

I've been doing some reading into extreme caving.  The really intense caving involves staying underground, often in pitch black to conserve light, for sometimes up to a month at a time.  It involves advanced rappelling equipment to get beyond sheer vertical drops.  Sometimes the passageway becomes flooded, and an advanced piece of scuba gear called a "rebreather" is required to stay underwater long enough to continue.  Sometimes there are flash floods.  Sometimes waterfalls, deafening as jet engines in the enclosed spaces of caverns, will plunge into huge underground lakes.  The temperatures are frequently low, and sometimes freezing.  An added difficulty to the sport is that rescue is nearly impossible in deep caves.  You can't just have a helicopter fly in and take people out.

Unfortunately, due to the darkness of the environment and the harshness of conditions, good photography of hardcore caves is much harder to come by than, say, hardcore mountaineering photography.  Do yourself a favor and do a google image search for Krubera (the deepest known cave, at over 7,000 feet of depth), or maybe try looking through this gallery for an idea of the dirtiness, claustrophobia, and verticality of the sport: http://www.kuleuven.be/spekul/expeditions/spain/pages/image000.html.

Of the very few good extreme caving photographs that I could find in the creative commons, take a look at this one:

(from WBUR's flickr photostream)

Claustrophobia, anyone?  How cool is that?

There are a few things that I find particularly awesome about this sport.  You may or may not agree with me, but here they are:

1.  Claustrophobia.  I think it is very cool how people continue to squeeze themselves down into tiny spaces, thousands of feet below the surface, without chance of rescue if they mess up, completely disoriented due to the lack of light, with the possibility of getting irreversibly lost down there.  People go caving, conquer this fear, or at least learn to live with it, and press on.
2. Colossal Cave Adventure.  You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.  Cave explorers don't have a map, and can't see further than their headlamps will illuminate the passageway ahead.  Who knows how many caverns are up ahead, how many rivers, how many small passageways branch off like the roots of a tree cutting thousands of feet into the Earth.  The entire process is pure exploration and discovery.
3. Journey to the Center of the Earth.  Have you googled for those images of Krubera yet?  If you have, and if you've seen the 1959 film version of "Journey to the Center of the Earth," you'll note the obvious similarity.  How could you hike down into a huge cave and not feel like you were in the movie?  (Yeah, yeah.  Don't answer that.  There are lots of ways, but still!)
4. As always, I am fascinated by humans performing unnatural feats.  The environment in some of the caves looks completely alien, full of mineral deposits and strange terrain.

The article that got me started learning about caves is this interview, which is packed with interesting facts about extreme caving: To the Supercave.

The article also mentions a book about the quest to find the deepest cave.  You can read the first few chapters online, here: http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Descent-Quest-Discover-Deepest/dp/1400067677.  After reading the first few chapters, I have added that book to the end of my reading queue.  It sounds like it will be every bit as interesting as "Into Thin Air" was, but perhaps even more so given how little people seem to know about caving.

If you've made it through this post despite the lack of pictures, I congratulate you... and hopefully you think this is half as cool as I do! :-)

Trip Report: Other Adventures in the Red Rocks

In addition to the recent posts on hiking in the Grand Canyon and hiking through Oak Creek Canyon in Sedona, I went hiking in a few other places while visiting Arizona.  Here, I will summarize the final four destinations, in the following order:

• The House (some nice views)
• The Vortex, and the Other Hill (ooo, mystical)
• Cathedral Rock (huge, beautiful rock formation, and danger with lightning)
• Devil's Bridge (walk over it... if you feel lucky)

Skip ahead to whatever interests you.

The House

We stayed with my grandparents at their rented house in Sedona.  Here are some of the views we woke up to in the morning:

Here are some of the views at night:

Here's me and my parents, with the view from the porch:

And the house itself:

It was a beautiful place to stay, situated right next to one of Sedona's mystical vortices!

The Vortex, and the Other Hill

Sedona has "vortices," or areas of unexplained mystical energy.  Sedona's a bit new-agey that way.  People like to hike out to the vortices, sit down and meditate, stack little piles of red rocks, play their drums or flute, etc.

(Many people in Sedona say "vortexes."  Apparently, both pluralizations are acceptable, so I'll go with the one that sounds better to me.  After being raised by a math prof and hearing about vertices my whole life, words like "vortexes" just make me wince.  I like cacti and matrices and Elvi.)

As it turns out, our beautiful home was right next to one of the four vortices!  At all times, people could be seen on the vortex.  Here's an example of a typical vortex sunset crowd looked like, from the porch of our house:

Ants on a hill.

My grandparents reported seeing many strange people up there, including a man dressed in a bright white cowboy uniform.  Meanwhile, the hill right next to the vortex was consistently deserted!  Poor, unloved hill.  We decided to take a hike over to the unloved hill, and then to the vortex itself.

Here is a picture of Dad on the top of the unloved hill:

The views from the unloved hill were just as nice as those from the vortex.  We could see some nice red rock formations:

The valley below:

And "Bell Rock," which Dad and I both agreed looked more like a giant breast than a bell:

I think we all liked the unloved hill more than the vortex hill.  More solitude.  I made my own mystical rock pile on the unloved hill:

From there, we moved on to the vortex.  There were two couples sitting on top of the vortex when we visited.  Both were silent, lost in contemplation or absorbing the energy.  I wanted to take a picture of me and Dad meditating at the vortex, but when looking around for Mom, who had the camera, we found that she had set off for a three mile hike.  No pictures for us.  Perhaps the vortex didn't want pictures of it taken... Perhaps it sensed our cynicism and repelled us... mysterious.

Cathedral Rock

It turns out that Cathedral Rock, one of our hiking destinations, is also a "vortex."  I get the feeling that people have confused the terms "pretty place" and "vortex," but the hike was nice.

We set out amid distant rolls of thunder.  Here are my parents, posing with Cathedral Rock and ominous clouds in the background:

Here's the rock again, this time in desktop photo format for your convenience! :)

As we continued upward, the thunder seemed to be approaching.  We repeatedly wondered whether the correct response was to climb to the top of the highest thing we could find, but we decided to push ahead anyway. 

Along the climb, we encountered flora such as my favorite thistle:

Mom's favorite dead tree:

And many prickly pears.  (Don't pick a prickly pear by the paw, when you pick a pear, try to use the claw!)

If you're into prickly pear, here's a prickly photo for your desktop!

The thunder continued to worsen, and we saw rain clouds consuming rock formations in the distance:

Still, none of us were more than vaguely worried, so we continued up the path, which began to get steeper:

We eventually came to the first great overlook, I mean, vortex!

From here, we ascended further to the second and final great viewpoint.  Looking down into the valley, we could see the river where our trail began:

Here, Mom points to a small pile of mystical vortex rocks in a dangerous location near a drop-off.  Someone may have risked their lives to bring you that pile of rocks.

Also at the top was a crack in the rock that very much wanted to be climbed... just look at it...

Time for a RED ROCK MONTAGE!

Montage end.  (If you liked that, check out my Arizona screensaver!)

Last up, and most dangerously, is...

Devil's Bridge

I want to avoid writing too much about this, because my photos of the location are on Mom's camera, which is back in Oregon.  I'll be there in a little over a week, at which point I can write about this hike in more detail.  It was a hike combining hilarity (we took a completely wrong route to the bridge, and the names of surrounding landmarks sounded like they came out of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra) and terror.

I will note, briefly, the "terror" section of the hike.  Devil's Bridge is a landmark for people who feel lucky.  It is a natural bridge of rock that could go tumbling down at any moment.  Kids love to run across it while saying, "Look, Mom, it's totally safe" and giving their parents heart attacks. 

(from katstan's flickr photostream)

We spent this section of the trip in a state of worry that we'd see someone die.  Close your eyes and concentrate for a moment.  Try to get yourself into that mindset.  And then, watch these videos I found on youtube: cartwheel and dance!

Really, between this and the tourists trying to take Grand Canyon photos as close to the rim as possible, I'm surprised we didn't see any close calls.  Wait a couple weeks and you'll be able to see photos of me and Dad tempting fate...

Closing Note

Writing this post has made me nostalgic.  It's been two weeks since I was in Sedona, and I wish I were there again.  The company and the scenery were excellent.  It's been a little over a year since I last fell in love with a location (the last time being Mt. Adams, WA), but these sorts of trips remind me why I love hiking and the outdoors.  Everywhere you turn in Sedona, it's unbelievably beautiful.  In Sedona-speak, must be the vortices!