The beauty in Vegas

I love blooming cacti.  I think they realize that there aren't many other flowers, so they have to make up for it in brightness and beauty.  These three pictures were taken near the end of the blooming time, so they were the last ones left.

 Here are some petroglyphs in Vegas (hand prints).

Humphrey's Peak, Arizona

 On May 27, we drove to Arizona's highest point, Humphrey's Peak, right outside of Flagstaff. It is 12,633 ft with a 9 1/2 mile round-trip trail. The trail starts at Snowbowl Ski Resort and winds its way up to a saddle.  This saddle is actually the ridge line to follow up to the peak, which used to be a volcano.  Now it is one Huge crater.  This mountain must have been a monster before it blew up.

We started hiking Friday evening in hopes of finding a good camping spot on the trail.  This mountain didn't seem to have one flat spot on it though.  We eventually found a less-steep spot to pitch our tent.  We were pushed up against our feet all night long, and it was very windy (loud) in the trees above us so we didn't sleep that great.  

We got up early the next morning and headed towards the top.  It was a beautiful day, but a bit windy.  

Here we are at the saddle.  This picture shows the summit in the background.

This mountain (facing the opposite direction from the picture above) is sacred and illegal to climb.

After taking these pictures, I decided it was a little too windy to have my nice camera out, so I packed it up and made sure it was strapped in well.  It was a good thing we did this, because I would have broken it for sure.  As we started trekking up the ridge line, it got more and more windy.  It started hurting my eye and making it hard to breath.  Pretty soon it was getting hard to walk straight.  We would go in spurts trying to avoid walking in the big gusts.  It kept getting worse, and pretty soon we were walking sideways trying to counteract the wind with huge stances so we wouldn't get blown off the mountain.  Then the huge gusts became constant with even harder longer gusts.  Our hands were getting beat up because we kept trying to brace ourselves on sharp volcanic rock.  I fell a few times and Jeremy accidentally started running a few times.  When we were almost to the top, I thought it might be better if I took my pack off.  I struggled to get it off and then realized that I couldn't leave it there because it would get blown off the mountain.  Then I couldn't get it back on so Jeremy had to come get it for me.  We got to the top, but the wind was getting even worse.  We think it was up to 100 mph winds.  We have never experienced anything like it.  It was painful and next to impossible to do anything in that kind of wind.

Here is a picture with our little camera at the top.  This was the only picture we took because it was very difficult.  It doesn't show up in the picture, but our skin was flapping in the wind.

The way down was even worse than the way up.  I fell several times, but I couldn't stand up afterwards, so I crawled on sharp volcanic rocks for a ways until I could stand up again when the wind gust lessened a tiny bit.  I realized that I was starting to hyperventilate because it was so hard to breath in the wind so I calmed myself down and we kept struggling to get off the peak.  It was extremely intense, but we finally got to a less windy spot where we could actually walk just leaning into the wind.  Whew!  After that, we just backpacked down the switchbacks and eventually got back to the truck.  It was a great hike!

We drove a few minutes and walked around at the Walnut Canyon National Monument.  It is a canyon outside of Flagstaff that used to be home to many Indians who lived there from 1100 to 1250.  There are lots of really cool cliff dwellings.

You can see the brick walls under the cliff ledges.

It was another fun, quick weekend trip.

 

Our Last Day in Hawaii

On our last day, we rented a sea-kayak and drove over to Kane'ohe Bay.  It was sunny!  This was the first sunny day we had and we were determined not to get too burnt.  We almost succeeded.  We paddled out over very shallow and colorful reefs, past a large, sunken island of white sand, to a little island called Kapapa Island.  We got in past the crashing waves and explored the island we had all to ourselves. 

 

There were crabs everywhere, but they liked to scuttle out of sight so we had to hold still until they came out again.

Looking back at Oahu from Kapapa Island.

This picture shows a boat with lots of people in the water.  The cool thing is that they were all standing knee deep on white sand (the sunken island).  There was a volleyball net set up in the water which looked like a blast.

This shows how shallow and beautiful the water was all the way out here.

Right as we were coming in, the sun went away, but here was our last look at the Ko'olau Mountains.

After kayaking back to the car, we stopped at a little beach that a local had told us about.  He said the sand was like baking powder, and it was.  Lanikai Beach was amazing!  We don't have pictures of it, but the sand was so fine and soft and white, it was exactly like baking powder.  We went snorkeling and the coral was also really different from the other beaches we had snorkeled at.  The fish were more skittish here, but you could still find tons of them.  We watched a family of little black and white fish swim around with every size from the big dad to the tiny tiny little baby.

My favorite thing here was a complete fluke.  I just happened to see this fish moving on the bottom.  I could only see it when it was moving and then I pointed it out to Jeremy and he saw it too.  Then we watched it dig in and hide under the sand for a minute or two and we somehow lost it.  There was no way we were finding it again.  Talk about a good camouflage.

We loved Lanikai Beach, but we had to leave.  We grabbed some shrimp from a shrimp shack, took a quick shower at the beach, and headed back to Waikiki.  We turned our kayak and snorkel gear back in and went to the airport.  What a vacation!  I would highly recommend Hawaii to everyone!

Day 5: Sharks!

Well, as you can see, we got to swim with the sharks!  Let me tell you, it was worth every penny!  We drove out to Hale'iwa (north side of Oahu) early in the morning because the ocean is calmer then.  Then we got on a boat with a few other people and slowly made our way into deeper waters.  We were 3 miles out from the beach.  The sharks are trained to come when they hear the slow diesel engine puttering out because they think they are going to get fed from the boats pulling up their crab pots and discarding the bait.  I was thinking there might be 5 sharks, but we got to the cage and they were swarming!  There were probably about 30 different sharks swimming all around our boat.  

We were the third and last group into the cage, so we got to watch from the boat as the sharks swam by.  The water bottle on the rope in the picture is full of vinegar which they like.  The sharks would swarm after it, but never try to eat it because they were too smart and knew it wasn't food.

Here is a shark testing out a leaf in the water.  He didn't eat it.  It was really cool to see the shark fins and tails cutting above the water.  It was amazing how graceful they were in the water.  It probably would have been a lot scarier if we had been stranded on a little wooden boat.

Here is a blurry picture from inside the cage.  You can tell there are 7 different sharks in the picture and this was normal to have this many swimming around and beneath us the whole time.

Here is my best underwater shot.  Most of the sharks had big gashes and scars all over them.  Several still had big nasty hooks in their mouths, and one shark still had a 30-foot line attached to his hook.  They looked pretty mean.

The only bad thing was that we were in the cage with two other people who were a bit large and there wasn't a whole lot of room in the cage to begin with.  This was an amazing experience though.

After the shark adventure was over, we went to Matsumoto's Shaved Ice shop.  It is famous and well deserved.  Mmmm!  We got the combos with ice cream at the bottom, shaved ice in multiple flavors in the middle, and sweetened condensed milk poured over the top.  Wow it was heavenly.

Then we spent a while at Sunset beach watching the waves and playing in them too.  We also went back to turtle beach to snorkel and here is a very blurry turtle.

After the beach and snorkeling, we decided to hike the Kuli'ou'ou Ridge Trail.  It started in a little neighborhood and went up into the clouds.  We saw so many different types of plants here that we hadn't seen on other hikes.  We also had song birds serenading us the whole way.

These pine trees were very weird and almost colorless compared to everything else.  Very strange to see in Hawaii.  Also, the ground was covered in inches of fallen needles so it was pretty soft and spongy.

Here was another type of pine tree.  We decided they were a mix between those camouflage cell phone towers and lego trees.  The big ones looked perfectly symmetrical.

On the way up, it started getting misty and wet, but also more green.

Here is the last part of the climb, and the last part of the visibility.

This was the top... we think.  We couldn't really see anything.

These two pictures reminded me of being in some remote Buddhist Temple at the top of a mountain with crazy trees and mist. (At least that's how the movies portray it).