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Next, we hiked the Lower Gulch Trail and got the scare of our lives. The actual creek that formed the gulch was bone dry, however much of the creek bed was clogged with bushes. Subsequently, the trail, or I should say trails, as many paths followed the dry creek on both sides of the canyon, and at many different levels looking over the creek bed.
This was a bit confusing, especially because many of the paths kind of petered out forcing us to backtrack to find the main path. Finally, we came to a dead end. To continue, we could either backtrack a long ways back, or we could climb up the side of the canyon. We chose to climb.
Here is where we got into trouble. As we picked our way up the cliff, the ledges we were trying to use got tinier and thinner and very precarious, until we found ourselves huddled on a dead-end shelf. We had to go back down. This was far easier said than done. Sometimes, you can, barely, pick your way up a climb, but going down proves to be nearly impossible. That is what happened here. The climb up was pretty scary. The climb down was on the magnitude of hair-raising. We couldn’t get a toe hold. We couldn’t get a hand hold. As we hugged the side of the cliff for dear life, we couldn’t see our feet. We just had to feel around for anything that might hold a toe without slipping. It was straight down - a long ways down. Inch by inch, we caterpillared our way across three long stretches of certain death.
When we reached safety, I was reminded of the time when my Cessna 150 engine quit and I had to make an emergency landing in a farmer’s field. My mind was clear as a bell, and my veins ran cold as ice during the landing, but my legs badly wobbled when I stepped out of the plane. My legs were again wobbling like rubber bands after that little bit of terror.
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