One of our favorite activities during our time at Lake Powell was at a place Luke and Liesa had found that you had to drive to with your boat, and then could hike and climb into. It had all sorts of adventures from scaling up waterfalls, to repelling into canyons, swimming through chilly river water, and hiking through slot canyons. It was definitely not for the faint of heart and required lots of physical exertion, a good sense of humor, a bit of luck, and a fair amount of rock climbing skills (or help from strong men pulling you up!)
We were hoping to see some frogs in the ponds as we hiked, but all we got was a baby catfish instead.
The canyons were just amazing!
The first big task for our canyoneering adventure was somehow getting to the top of this waterfall. It definitely was harder than it looked. Tyler went first and got up fairly easy, and then Adam got up to the middle part as well and was able to help me up. However, I couldn’t for the life of me get up the 2nd leg of the waterfall and after many attempts my arms and wrists were just done and so I ended up scaling back down the waterfall and deciding to just stay back with the littles.
I did manage to take this cool shot of our group when I got to the first part of the waterfall.
However, just after I finished trying to scale the waterfall, the men were able to figure out that if they got two of them to the top portion of the waterfall that they could mostly just PULL people up by the rope and they were able to get everyone up the waterfall that way. I was SO wishing I’d waited a bit because I would have also gotten a free ride up but I had exhausted myself trying to climb it the first time and didn’t think I could do it again. I have tendinitis in my wrists and they unfortunately slow me down quite a bit with physically hard challenges. Oh well. Maybe next time. 🙂
The older boys loved the adventure and had fun going on to see more of the canyon.
They eventually came to a 2nd waterfall which also needed to be climbed up.
Luckily this one was a bit easier as someone had carved places to step and hold onto like a ladder as you climbed up. Genius!
And here they are climbing up a third waterfall.
Apparently there was a big deep hole near it, and Adam decided to jump in and try to see how far down it went.
They saw some beautiful country as they went.
It definitely was the highlight of most of the boys during the trip! They loved the challenge and enjoyed getting to use their rock climbing and canyoneering skills.