Sunday, September 7, 2008

Another Outdoors Trip!






We spent most of Labor Day Weekend camping at the top of Oak Creek Canyon between Sedona and Flagstaff, Arizona. These pictures show Slide Rock Park, a natural rock water slide near Sedona. You can enter it through a paid, crowded parking lot, but we hiked down in and were able to swim through a secluded beautiful swimming hole (shown) before getting to the crazy crowds of people. It was entertaining to watch the people of all ages fill Slide Rock Park, little kids and adults both going down this natural water slide. We did some cliff jumping too! Paul and I both did one that is probably 35 feet high (?) and Paul then did one that is maybe 55-60 feet high (high enough to plug my ears the rest of the day, but it was fun! I felt daring of course).

Camping was fun - once we found out Paul had a half day on Friday on a holiday weekend, we thought we should use it up! I will tell you briefly about our fellow campers and then I will stop so I don't complain too much! We camped in some unofficial open land campgrounds where hardly anyone else was to be found. Then Friday night some people decided to join us within 100-200 feet, despite the open land. With their RV generator running late, they also thought it would be a good idea to start loudly partying at midnight each night, kids up and yelling and all. Then Saturday after we had been gone all day and came back, they had like 30 family members who had joined them. They were blasting their booming, abnoxious music for hours and into the night, and were firing shot guns in the campgrounds! (A 22 and a 45 - even in the dark). This all repeated every day until we left early on Sunday night instead of Monday afternoon when we had planned to leave. Saturday night we called a ranger/911 on them for the gun shooting and ended up just playing phone tag with a deputy who could never find us. The time we spent in our campground was interesting to say the least.

SO, we had fun camping, but just avoided our campground as much as possible.


Here are two videos of people cliff jumping where we had (didn't have our camera on us when we went) and of me making Taya crack up in the hammock.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Darn hillbillies! That is super annoying to have noisy neighbors while camping. But looks like you guys still had some fun! I like how Paul is posing for that picture. Arm around you, but not touching you :)

XO said...

Ooh, this looks AWESOME. So, I'm guessing you were able to park somewhere near your campsite and then hiked into Slide Rock. Joel is jealous too. We may just have to pick your brains about this trip and see if we can go sometime before it gets too cold!

Denise said...

I feel like such a whimp everytime I look at yours or sara's blog. Looks like you had fun. I kind of wish we had done more of that type of thing when we only had one, now it just seems way to overwhelming. Once again, feeling wimpy. (does whimp have an h or not?)

Davis' said...

Those pictures are amazing. Too bad about the bad neighbors, but at least you had a fun and memorable time.