No more photos from this point on… we were too busy finishing the hike. \ud83d\ude42 So we headed down, and up, and down, and up again, and so on until we finally thought we had climbed the last uphill on our hike. Well, we got to the top of the ridge and found that the trail had at least some more ups left. So we started climbing, and climbing, and climbing… and it seemed that we were just getting way too high and far away from the canyon we wanted to be in. So we took out our trail map, inspected it, and decided we must have missed another trail that headed where we wanted to go. So we headed back down and cut across, off-trail, to try and find the other trail. This is where we added some miles and elevation gain to our hike. We went all over the place in this little canyon\/saddle\/bowl\/thing, and finally climbed up to the top of the ridge on the other side, looked back, and to our great disappointment saw the trail we were on before actually started headed down exactly where we wanted just a bit further down the canyon. We were pretty upset with ourselves, but lesson learned! Get a better map! Follow the trail in front of you! So anyways…. we went all the way back across to our trail, and hiked up to Static Peak Divide. I think this is the highest point yet on our hike, at about 11,000 feet. From here it was all downhill to Death Canyon and Phelps Lake. It seemed to take forever. Thankfully, our legs actually felt pretty good and we were able to go down pretty fast without hurting. We finally reached Phelps Lake, after hiking down Death Canyon in the dark, and had to hike another 4-5 miles around the lake and to the road where we were hoping a car was waiting to pick us up. We tried talking (and Josh sang that 100 bottles of coke on the wall song) for a while, but by the end we were both pretty quiet. It got pretty tiring to keep on hiking, and we were both ready to end. Finally we reached the road and saw Jared’s suburban waiting there for us. Praise the Lord! It was about 9:20pm. We were happy to be finished.<\/p>\n
So that’s the hike that I’m pretty sure totaled around 43 miles and 8000 feet elevation gain or so. It topped Josh’s day hike record of 40 or 41 miles that he did while on the Appalachian Trail, and it sure topped my previous record of around 20 miles! A great experience, for sure… but we both decided that we’re keeping day hikes under 30 miles from now on. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
So thankful to the Lord for this awesome experience, and the strength He gave us to complete it! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well to make a long story short, last Saturday Josh Stafford and I hiked 43 miles with around 8000 feet of elevation gain in Grand Teton National Park. We planned (Josh likes to say that I was the one who planned it…) to hike from Paintbrush Canyon all the way up and around the Tetons […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[167,194,195,146,156,118,200,122,199,91,153],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derrickzuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derrickzuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derrickzuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derrickzuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derrickzuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.derrickzuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derrickzuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derrickzuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derrickzuk.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}