I ended up on Chucks sofa and slept pretty good last night. I woke up at on point and the muscles in my legs were twitching and I just ad to get up and walk around for a while until they settled down. Everyone was up around 5:30 this morning and we had coffee and cereal for breakfast. I had my first shower in almost 2 weeks and that felt awesome! Dave took off for Phoenix a little after 6:00.

The river portion of the trip...

We were up again around 5:30 yesterday and had coffee, orange juice, cereal, fruit and English muffins for breakfast. We broke camp and were on the river around 8:00. It was a beautiful morning to be on the river and it brought back so many wonderful memories. I need to figure out how to take another river trip!

We got down to the confluence with the Little Colorado River around 9:30 and stopped there for a while to pick up some other hikers who had come over on the Beamer Trail. We also picked up trash along the left bank just south of the confluence.

From the LCR to Tanner was nice as the morning warmed up and the Canyon opened up. We had a nice splashing (soaking) going through Lava Chuar Rapids and it felt good. We also had a good run through Sixty-Mile Rapids earlier in the morning. I loved the wide-open views of the Watchtower at Desert View as we got closer and closer to Tanner. It was nice to see it growing in size again after watching it shrink for the past several days.

We finally arrived at Tanner Canyon around 12:30, ate our lunches, said our good-byes to the boat party and were on the trail around 1:00.

We made AWESOME time on the trail and did the 9+ miles in just under 6½ hours. It was incredible! I took the lead for the stretch through the Muav and Redwall and felt like I was flying up he trail. After that I fell back into the tail position for the rest of the hike out as I was just going too fast. We all stayed together for the remainder of the hike out and it was really nice. We didn't really stop that much. We got to Stegosaurus Rocks just after sunset and round 7:00 or so we had to put on our head lamps because it was dark already. Hiking out the top portion of the Tanner Trail in the dark was very different and it made that final stretch a lot easier.

We finally topped out on the south rim just before 8:30. We headed back to Chucks place in the village first to change clothes and then we went over to the Arizona Room for dinner. It was a good feed.