Okay, so I posted some pictures of the trail hike JT and I took. Now, I will give you a summary of the great day we had. I woke up around 3:50 AM and took a quick shower. JT and I got dressed and Shawna took us to the trailhead. We prayed together. One blessing I have noticed is how JT is really showing spiritual maturity when he leads prayers. It was cold and we were covered in layers but we were confident it would warm up as the sun came out and the day went on. It did. We hit the trail at about 4:40 AM and hiked at a fairly slow, but steady pace. We took about an hour to get to the mile-and-a-half rest house. We stopped and got something to drink. As you can see from the previous post, we took a lot of pictures. What you saw is a very small sampling of what we actually took. We got to the three-mile rest house at about 6:40 am and the sun was up enough that we did not need our flashlights any more. JT commented several times about the rock formations. We made it to about the half-way point down at a campground area called Indian Gardens at about 7:50 AM and stayed about 20 minutes. We ate some and then hit the trail to move on to the river. At a couple of points, JT wanted to turn around but with a little encouragement, we kept going. In the end, he stated he was very glad he did not turn around at all. We arrived at the river at 9:50 AM and rested a while. We continued to take a lot of pictures and take our time as we knew we had plenty of daylight left in the day. I was glad we left so early in the morning. The move up out of the canyon was slower for sure but we were keeping a steady pace. We got back to Indian Gardens at 12:10 PM. We turned out pants into shorts (the legs zipped off to convert them to shorts). We made it to the three-mile rest house at 1:50 PM and stayed a while. We were noticeably getting more sore and tired but still moving, slower but sure. It was 3:30 PM when we made it back to the mile-and-a-half rest house and we stayed for about 30 minutes. We would walk about 100 strides and rest for a couple of minutes. Every 10 sets of 100 strides, we rested longer and slowly moved on up out of the canyon. As we moved on, JT kept trying to text Shawna letting her know we were getting close. We made it back to the trailhead at about 5:30 PM making the total hike a little less than 13 hours.
Shawna took us to the room and JT and I took showers while Shawna and Kaylee went to get something to eat. After they got back, Shawna took me to get something to eat and JT insisted on not wanting to leave the room. I transferred the pictures from the camera to the computer and iPad. We had planned on having a family devotional but apparently, I was asleep by 8:00 PM. JT has since insisted it was the best day of vacation and wanted to talk to everyone about it. He even called his Grampy from the room (we did not get very good cell service at the canyon) and told him about the day. It was a great day!
-j
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