Falling Without Much Style

I have lived in Utah Valley for two years now. I have been on a grand total of seven hikes during that time. Not too shabby, right? Except that four of those hikes have been to the BYU's Y mountain. Does that seem a little pathetic to anyone else? Hike five was up to the Timpanogas Caves and hike six was to Stuart Falls. Neither of these are very grueling. Each is made up of a nice, slowly sloping path leading to some picturesque view. But hike number seven was what I've wanted out of a hike since I moved to Provo, Utah.

It was Pioneer Day weekend (a three-day weekend in Utah) and my roommate Alex and I decided it was time to get off our butts and go do something. We decided a morning hike would be lovely. After surfing the web for good Utah Valley hikes we decided on Bridal Falls. We convinced our other roommate, Celia, and our friends Kevin and Cameron to come with us. The website said that the hike's difficulty was "medium". The website was probably right, but I don't think we took the right path. We kind of just found our way up to the falls. This included a lot of climbing and precarious balancing, but it wasn't that bad and the falls were beautiful!

Of course, we had to come down eventually. The first problem with this is that we couldn't quite remember what our path was coming up. The second was that our climbing and scaling wasn't all that hard going up. Going down was a problem. After wandering and backtracking around the mountain, we found ourselves sliding/ scaling down a long and steep slope of loose shale rock.

Let me note that, before this point in the hike, Alex and I had both nearly fallen to our deaths.

Alex was behind me and we were walking across a ledge that was pretty solid at the top, but created a dirt slope down to a rocky cliff. As we carefully went across, I heard Alex lose her footing. I turned and saw her clawing at the dirt to stop her slip off the edge. She did, but as she slipped, I watched knowing that there was nothing I could do to save her. Scratched and bruised, Alex got back to the solid part of the path, and we continued our search for the way down.

If that didn't shake me up enough, my near-death experience took care of the problem. Some minutes later we found ourselves on a different ledge with lots of loose rock and no slope before the drop-off. Somewhere in the middle, the rock shifted below my feet and I lost all balance. There was a crack in the wall we were walking against and I managed to grab this before I fell. It felt like my shoulder had been pulled out of the socket. It took me a few seconds before I could move it again- I think this was just because I was so shaken. But I was back on my feet, so we kept moving.

As we all shimmied down the loose shale rock, we separated into three groups. Alex and Cameron were the fastest in getting down. Celia and Kevin brought up the rear, working together to find the best way down. I was flying solo, somewhere in between. This was pretty scary. Each step was a gamble and if you weren't holding on to something secure, you pretty much just had to hope that your foot would find something secure, or that you would find anything to hold on to before you slid too far.

We all made it down, scratched up and bruised. As the last of us stepped off of the mountain and on to the road back to the car, we all looked at each other and just laughed. We knew that we just did something stupid. We knew that our parents would freak if they knew. We knew that we shouldn't let this make us think we're invincible.

But that didn't stop Alex and I from making plans to go paragliding.