St. George Part 1- Snow Canyon Hike

A group from my ward went down to St. George to get away for the three-day weekend. We headed down Friday afternoon and ate dinner at Kelsey's house.

Saturday we got up bright and early (10 am) for a breakfast of lemon cream pastries, toast and oatmeal (Seriously. I'll talk about the food in another post). Because Andrew just got his cast off on Tuesday, we decided to do some easy hikes, but it turned out those hikes were basically just trails.

We wanted a little more adventure, so we explored one of the caves.

We led each other using one flashlight and 5 iPhone flashlight apps (thanks Steve Jobs). When we got into the darkest part of the cave we told scary stories, and by scary stories I mean Kevin told us about the time a homeless guy was sleeping in his car. 

We moved onto the next adventure. Andrew had his eye on a couple of really high cliffs that he called "The Cliffs of Insanity" (obligatory Princess Bride Reference). We climbed and hiked. 

At one point Andrew scurried up the face of a rock and the rest of us couldn't figure out how to get up. I finally found a little handhold and pulled myself up and Ryan came up too. Nobody else wanted to come, and since 1. I'm on a constant quest to prove I'm not a pansy and 2. there wasn't a clear way to get down, I joined Andrew and Ryan toward the Cliffs of Insanity.

It was hard. There were times we were literally Spiderman-ing it up these rocks. I had a little advantage because my hands and feet are smaller and I could use smaller hand and footholds. We climbed for what seemed like forever, until finally we realized that the Cliffs of Insanity were completely unreachable. They weren't even attached to the cliffs we were on. 

So we started to head down. Or, we tried to. Every way we tried to get down it seemed like there was a huge drop off. I'll admit that this was the point the classic Melissa Connor Worry Freak Out started to kick in. We had a small bag of trail mix and one water bottle between the three of us. What if we had to spend the night? What if no one ever found us? What if I died without taking my American Humanities test?

Luckily after a prayer and some expert navigation, we found a way down. But it was definitely harder than going up. It required a lot of crawling down on our butts and not standing on the edge of certain rocks. At one point, I started sliding down a big rock and Ryan literally reached up and stopped me with his hands. My hero. 

An hour and a half of climbing down through rocks, brush and then sand, we finally made it back to the road with scrapes, bruises and a million stories.