6:43 pm - Kanab Creek near the Slide of Susurrus

Today was a pretty easy day and we took our time getting up here. It was only about 3½ miles from the river to the junction with the side canyon in which the Slide of Susurrus (Slide Spring) is located. We left the river about 8:45 and got to camp around 1:30, taking a couple of rest breaks and about an hour for lunch along the way.

Everyone except Chuck started out together as he stayed behind to wait for Jasek to catch up with us. Jasek and Chuck both caught up with us during our second rest break, around 10 or 10:30 I think.

When we got to camp we spent some time sitting around, chatting and sharing some of Bolek's Captain Morgan rum. It was a nice way to celebrate arriving at camp. After an hour or so of that we took off on a little dayhike up to see the Slide of Susurrus. It was pretty easy getting up there except for the ledges right at the very end which creeped me out a little. I almost didn't go at first but I knew everyone else would be going though so I basically gave in to my own self-imposed, subconscious peer pressure and forced myself to deal with it. In hind-sight it was not that bad and it was definitely worth it. The slide and spring was absolutely wonderful. We all went skinny dipping and swam to the other end of the pool and just hung out in the alcove beneath the spring.

Later in the day we finally made our way back to camp, setup our various sites and had dinner. I have room for the tent here tonight but I am going tent-less.

I had a bit of a minor catastrophe after dinner when I went to put some stuff back into my backpack and found a puddle of water inside. Apparently I did not tighten the cap on one of my water bladders enough and a lot of the water leaked out. What a mess it made! One of my lens cases got wet on the outside but luckily the inside pouch kept the lens dry. When I picked up the backpack to move it I also found puddle of water on my ground cloth so I had another mess to clean up there.

We saw a herd of big horn sheep at camp this morning and that was pretty cool. There was a huge ram with 2 or 3 females and at least one other young male. It was funny as the young male challenged the ram a couple of times while we were watching but the ram just totally ignored him.

The hike up to camp today required a lot of creek crossings and my feet as well as my boots were soaked by the time we got here... feet, socks, boots... everything. I hope the boots dry out over night but then again tomorrow is probably going to be more of the same anyway, so...

Tomorrow us going to be a long day and we are going to try to get to the junction of Kanab and Jumpup Canyons, about 10 miles up canyon from here. If we make it that will put us in good position for Thursday though so I hope we can pull it off.