It has snowed a little bit everyday for the last 3 or 4 days here in Alaska. Every morning and evening I take my daughter’s dog for a walk. It’s about 6/10 of a mile in the morning and 3/10 of a mile at night (mostly because I don’t like walking in the dark). The last few days have been slow walking for me, as the snow is really soft.

As I was walking yesterday morning, it brought back a fun memory I had about walking through dry sand, which is about like walking through soft, unpacked snow. I thought I would share a little bit about the memory.

When I was about 14 years old, my Church’s youth group decided to hike into the Grand Canyon to Havasupai and spend a few days down exploring the area. We started off leaving Cedar City early on a Monday morning and drove down to the parking area where the hike starts.

We put on our packs and started out. This is the first time I had ever gone backpacking, and my older brother who was also on the hike, had maybe gone one other time on a backpacking trip. I feel like I was ill-prepared for the hike that ensued. I believe we were told it was a 7 mile hike. It’s actually 10 miles.

We wound down the switchbacks to the floor of the canyon, that was the easiest part of the entire hike. I remember jogging a couple of times and my brother telling me to slow down so I didn’t wear myself out. I didn’t listen very well. I realized later how wise the advice was.

The bottom of the canyon is fairly level, not a lot of ups and downs. But the ground was sandstone with lots of variation in the surface. As we were going along, my feet started to hurt. I then thought to myself, I wish we had something softer to hike on.

Not long after that, we hit a dry riverbed area with lots of sand. We hiked in this dry river bed for quite some time. Long enough for me to realize how hard it is to walk in dry sand. It felt like every step was 10 times harder because each step I pushed off I lost a little bit of momentum as my foot slid backward in the soft sand.

I vividly remember getting out of that dry river bed and being so grateful for the hard, uneven sandstone that we walked on most of the rest of the way. Getting to the campground and being able to soak my feet in the cool river water was a huge relief at the end of our hike.

Havasupai is a beautiful place. Desert and desolate looking until you get down near the end of the hike, to the river, and then it’s an oasis. There are quite a number of different waterfalls in the area. We spend a lot of time at the Havasu falls, with an excursion to Mooney falls one afternoon and on our way back out we stopped at I believe Navajo falls.

Hiking back out the leaders sent half of the packs out on donkey’s. We had a buddy, mine was my brother. We were then able to share the load back out, especially for the last part, the switchbacks back up and out of the canyon. My brother started off letting me help a little with the pack, but he carried it most of the way, and all the way up the switchbacks.

It’s funny how slogging through the snow can remind me of a desert canyon with a beautiful oasis at the end.