One of my students wrote this after our trip for her ‘blog post’ assignment. Enjoy 🙂

Hiking the Grand Canyon
Written by Jiyeon

June 11th, the 7th day of our road trip—Today was like the highlight of this trip, at least to me because I have been excited about hiking the Grand Canyon for a long time. Actually, it was my third time to visit this amazing place; first, back in 2007, I gave it a glance on my way to Las Vegas from L.A.  Also, last year, I briefly visited here on a tourist bus with my parents. I was for sure surprised and impressed by this masterpiece of Mother Nature at that time, but the feeling only lasted for about 10 minutes (haha). I thought I was missing something; just looking at it and taking pictures was not good enough. So, I was glad that Lauren planned for us to go on a hike into the Grand Canyon!

We chose the South Kaibab Trail, which was one of the moderate hiking courses about three miles roundtrip. But it also had the best view of all the trails for such a short hiking distance. We each prepared two bottles of water and Gatorade, beef jerky, and some oatmeal bars in our back packs and started the hike!

As you can imagine, hiking the Grand Canyon is completely opposite to any general hike in any mountains; you go downhill first, then uphill. That’s something you should remember when you hike there. You should not spend too much of your energy while going down. I was very scared of the height, and the trail was slippery, so I had to take every step carefully, using a lot of my energy. I didn’t realize it at first, but going down was nothing compared to climbing up, and I didn’t know the trail was that steep until we started going up! Going uphill was a tremendously tiring thing for me. I had to take a short break almost every 5-10 minutes. However, it took us three hours and finally, I made it. To be honest, I regretted doing this for a while, especially when I almost fell over going downhill, but I didn’t give up halfway. It was worth it eventually and I felt proud of myself. Now I realize why I didn’t feel that I fully enjoyed the canyon in my past two visits. You should sweat there and feel the breeze by hiking in the canyon. I will never forget how fresh the breeze was and how amazing the Canyon looked when I came down and took in the view!

It was such a good experience, and next time, I’ll go down to the bottom to see the Colorado River!