We’re a motley crew–my Navajo cousin Rachel, Ecuadorian Erica clocking in at less than 5′ tall, Gage the fruitarian, and the historically desert averse, your truly.
But, I’ve been longing to do this trip for years, and when Rachel invites me in place of her son who got injured, I jump at the chance.
From Rachel’s house in Phoenix, we set off for Sedona’s red rock beauty for lunch, death-defying acrobatics
and spring water before we driving into the high lonesome: deep desert. There aren’t even cactus anymore. I fully expect tumbleweed to tear across the empty highway.
We reach a town at the birthplace of historic Route 66, (photo op across from the Road Kill Cafe that serves Long Gone Fawn, Bad Break Steak and Swirl of Squirrel)
and continue on, finally pulling into the Caverns Inn, in the middle of nowhere.
The land around us smiles with half lidded eyes. You’d never know what was here–it just looks like horizon, snakeweed and searing blue sky.
But the desert hides its treasures well.
Everyone with permit to hike Havasupai has to check in here first, and we’re staying the night. We don our wrist bands, huddle in the back of the gift shop to a sign a waiver, and our native Hualapai guide opens an elevator with no floor numbers. We step in and start dropping. “Look through the slit,” she whispers, nodding to where the elevator’s edge leaves a gap.
I peek into a chasm of rocky forever and quickly step back, unnverved by the depth.
Hundreds of feet down, we get off into a cool, quiet darkness. Here in the middle of the desert, is the biggest dry cave system in the United States.
So the story goes: in the 1920’s a white guy in northern Arizona is walking to a poker game, trips and nearly falls right into a hole in the desert–a temporary crypt for the Hualapai tribe’s people lost to influenza at the turn of the century. The poker guy lowers a cowboy buddy down into the caves with a rope, who claims there’s gold down there, and poker guy promptly buys hundreds of acres of the surrounding land. After realizing cowboy was a bit off–the caves have iron oxide but no riches, he turns it into a tourist attraction. Later the US government adds nuclear fallout shelter to the roles of burial ground and tourist trap–an interesting choice though, with just one entrance and virtually no airflow.
Our guide stops, shines a light on a ceiling of white rock like blooming clouds that she says contain brilliant geodes.
“Oh,” Rachel smiles. “I know those. On the rez, those were our marbles.”
My eyebrows raise.
Rachel’s mom is a full blooded Native American, and her grandfather a well known medicine man on the nearby Navajo reservation.
It’s a, err, small cave tour, so we get talking. After hearing our plans, our Hualapai guide admits she’s never been to the famous turquoise waters of Havasu, an hour away. Which will ring in my head later, noticing that I don’t see one native person in the gorgeous waters. More on the history of the Havasupai (which is an anglicized tweak of Havasu Baaja, meaning people of the blue-green water) here, from a fellow blogger:
https://theawkwardtraveller.com/havasupai-history/
We continue, gazing up at the restaurant and swearing next time we’ll reserve a spot to eat dinner inside the caverns: a handful of tables in the earth’s cold belly of crystals and rock. (You have to call at least a day ahead.)
We pass a mummified coyote.
Heaps of nuclear war fallout shelter crackers.
Bucket toilets and tp.
A 2X4-and-cloth wedding arch, and a now defunct “suite,” a king size bed in the middle of the highest ceilinged cave cathedral, flanked by giant speakers.
“People couldn’t resist exploring at night,” our guide explains, “so…yeah no more overnights. We had to rescue some of them.”
We wake in starry darkness to drive one more hour and get on the trail before the sun. Just before the pavement ends, we share our intentions for the trip–it sounds like every one of us is ripe for this. The mood, like the dawn light, is hushed. Bags are piled in a corner of the parking lot for the mule train. At least we hope so. There’s no one but clueless fellow hikers milling around, psyching themselves up, adjusting laces and straps. “No pictures,” some signs say. Others remind us, “Entering sacred lands.”
And so we begin.
Off we go down the switchbacks as the sun begins to rise, passing people…heading back up?
“What time did you leave camp?” I ask a group, confused to see people nearly done with the epic hike we’re just starting at daybreak.
“1am.”
What?!
I ask another.
“Maybe 2?”
These people seem nuts.
But maybe I’m the crazy one because I don’t understand the sun, the desert, the exhaustion, I don’t know. We walk on.
The sound of pink sand crunches under underfoot. We have a loooong way to go and nothing to rely on but ourselves.
I notice damiana bushes in bloom, and dark wet seeps from rock slits. The canyon walls are so tall that if I were a sundial, I’d only register a shadow between 11 and 2 or so. A blessing.
We pass rocks bigger than cars, and look up at others balanced precariously atop ridges like a strong wind could tip them over. I take it all in, in awe: the smooth etchings of water on rock, flowers, birds’ nests pecked into sandstone, beauty in the desert I’ve never seen before, hour after hour.
In the silence, a whooshing sound startles my eyes upward, landing on a jet black raven, his wings cutting hard on the dry air. The sound of its effort echoes through the canyon. I smile, awed again.
And then a strange thunder from behind–clompity complity boom boom!
We dart to the side of the trail.
The mule train barrels through, a native man astride a horse leading the donkeys, each animal attached nose to tail with rope, their sides lashed with backpacks.
The smell of donkey dung lingers after they pass. The sun creeps higher. Between mule trains, a calm crew of horses:
After almost 8 miles, my feet are sore and my legs start to ache, but I’m shocked at how little I eat. Drink. A strange peace is settling in.
And that’s when I see it.
After a break in the canyon, before us is the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen, clear as a bell with a turquoise tinge, radiating vibrance.
Shrieks erupt from our group and dusty clothes fall to the riverbank as we plunge our hot, sore, dusty selves in.
It’s FREEZING. Even as the water blissfully extinguishes the desert heat in my bones, it also stuns and dazzles me. It’s thick with calcium and magnesium, I remember. But that doesn’t feel like the thing–it’s the radiance of the color and the feeling of purity that moves me.
We step back into our dusty clothes and continue.
I insist we stop at a clump of prickly pear cactus decorated with handfuls of juicy magenta fruit covered in spikes. Fresh food!!
I was imagining eating only my astronaut packets mixed with boiled water for four days. Rachel has a lighter, so they show me the desert kids trick of holding the flame around the fruit until the spikes are all burned off, and then the sweet, juicy cactus fruit goes straight into, and around, our mouths. Heaven.
The river wanders off and Havasupai Village opens before us. This is a place that has never known the irreverent ease of cars, and so has retained something wild, something elemental. Here the only access is by foot, mule, or helicopter.
The village requests no pictures be taken, so here’s my picture in words:
Stoic wooden houses, dusty corrals, dirt roads. Rez dogs sleep under forgotten fig and pomegranate trees heavy with fruit, their lower leaves browned with dust. At the center of the village is a school, church, community hall, market and a cafe with counter seating facing the helipad–the biggest show in town–where native families get off with bulging suitcases and plastic toys, and skittish foreigners shrug on their tall backpacks, decked out in all the shoulds – sturdy clean shoes, zipper-off pants, sun hats, handkerchiefs, camelbacks. Shiny ravens watch from fenceposts, necks flicking back and forth.
And then there’s me, carrying just a guitar, the white girl with the three brown beauties who look not quite of this place but not so foreign either.
After the village it’s just 2 miles to the campground–we’re so close now.
At last we descend into the river valley: hammocks strung between trees on white sand river-islands, shallow turquoise water rushing over travertine pools, grassy meadows, all flanked by high canyon walls. It’s heavenly.
Once our lay-flat camping hammocks are up (dubious design–if you move around in your sleep you might flip) it begins.
Every day is a new hike to a new waterfall.
Like this one. We see a group stunned on the other side of these pronghorn sheep, and decide to forge ahead. Luckily the sheep just chew their cud, watching, although we hear another hiker–a big, tall guy–had a different experience! We follow the trail that crosses the river over and over holding our packs on our heads, and traipse through fields of wild grape. Wild grape! This is my favorite place besides the waterfalls.
Here is Fifty foot falls- the water is only brown because of so many people wading through it. There’s no trail alongside it, just more water. It’s accessed by bushwacking in and along the stream and springs below.
And dear, slightly treacherous Mooney Falls:
And stunning Havasu Falls, a threshold of amazingness just before the campground.
These day trips are punctuated by stops at the village cafe (or the trailside tarp-cafe halfway to town) for fry-bread, where Erica and Rachel wait at my favorite “table:”
and for me, there’re snaps of bitter wild celery growing in a ferny spring along the path, and spicy nibbles of watercress trailing in the river. Who knew there’d be wild food! We even found a juicy pomegranate in a deserted part of the village, and next time I’ll be eating those grapes if I’m there in August, or steaming the leaves for dolmas.
Hot on the trail towards Beaver Falls,
the longest trek from the campground, requires way-finding, multiple river crossings, and maybe wild sheep crossing. But the reward–if you can find the ladder by the date palm,
and find a way down the ambiguous cliffside, and across the slippery rocks mid-rushing river, is magic.
And if all this weren’t amazing enough, I go wandering not five minutes from our campsite and find an empty landscape of smoothed echoes of waterholes, rock climb-able walls (though frowned upon, as there are no medical services if ya fall) and a proper cave. I even read about a warm spring somewhere around here. I just came to journal and ended up in a dark cave with a guy and a guitar and a gray rabbit. There is no shortage of adventures here.
Even getting to some of the main waterfalls will make you feel alive, (Mooney I’m talking to you!) with their slick ladders and dark tunnels. Just part of the trail…
So. If you have the chance to secure an elusive permit to hike into Havasupai, consider yourself very, very lucky.
