Well, the primary action of this Havasu Falls trip is now behind us — we trekked 10 miles to camp, spent a day hiking to various waterfalls in the area, and then swam in the blue pools at Havasu Falls. The beauty of this place has exceeded my expectations and I’m thrilled to have finally made it here.

Today I’ll wrap up the end of our trip. After leaving Havasu Falls, we walk 5 minutes back to our campsite. Around dinnertime Irving runs back to get Indian fry bread from one of two food stands at the entrance to camp (they close around 6pm).

As I wrote the other day, this is typical Indian fry bread, covered in beans and cheese. And at the cafe in the village, they do a giant Indian taco with this as the base topped with beef, heaps of lettuce, tomato, and sour cream. You can also order it plain with honey and powdered sugar. However you slice it, Indian fry bread is quite tasty.

We use the camping stove to boil water so I can cook my Trader Joe’s punjab spicy eggplant for dinner. No photos of that, but it was delicious and an easy camping meal.

Irving spots a frog trying to make its way up from the water to our campsite:

I end the evening in my tent reading Joe Orton’s 1969 farce, What the Butler Saw, which recently ran at the Taper in LA. Sadly I missed that production, but the play is a hoot and I was laughing in my tent while reading it.

We get up around 5:45am to pack up our gear and prepare for the return journey. Irving and I have already decided that we’ll pay for mules to carry our packs up to the hilltop parking lot — at around 45 lbs. each, it’s not worth the wear and tear on our backs. As my former yoga teacher used to say, “You can’t go to the back store and buy a new back.” So we anticipate spending around $20-$30 per bag to send them up on a mule.

When we spoke with a campground manager at the on-site office the previous evening, he said to bring our stuff over by 6:30am and he’ll likely find a mule for us. If not, we can carry the bags two miles up to the village and find a mule up there.

So at 6:30am, we walk to the campground entrance with our belongings. There are no mules. We’re told that the mules are coming but it might be another hour before they depart camp, and we won’t know for sure if they have space until then. Okay… so Irving and I decide to hike up to the village and try our luck there.

One last glimpse at Havasu Falls on the way out…

And here’s Navajo Falls, bathed in early morning light:

We get to the village. That’s the helicopter field that was bustling the day we arrived here; today, there are no flights and all is quiet.

We walk back to the Tourism Office to inquire about reserving space on a mule. The woman inside is very helpful — each mule costs around $90 and holds approximately four backpacks. So we can pay for the whole thing ourselves (too pricey) or split the cost of a mule with someone else (not likely at this hour, but that doesn’t stop me from asking a few hikers wearing packs as they pass by us). We go for a different option — find a mule owner already heading up to the parking lot and negotiate a price for our bags.

We get breakfast in the village cafe — I order a bagel with cream cheese, and they have surprisingly good coffee — while we keep an eye out for mule trains passing by outside, ready to spring into action and chase one down.

About an hour later we have it all worked out. The locals here are helpful (both to us, and to each other) as they figure out who has space for our bags. For example, I stop one man as he’s heading up to the hilltop parking lot — the mules he’s leading have nothing on their backs, so I ask him if he would take our bags for a price. He explains he’s the mailman so he won’t take bags up; he just brings the mail back down to the village. Isn’t that interesting? He could have made an extra $50 but he’d be taking it away from one of his neighbors, and this guy already has a good gig working for the mail service. (Side note: Irving wonders if he’s paid by the U.S. postal service as a mailman, or since this is a Native American reservation perhaps the postal service will only deliver to the parking lot and then the village pays this guy to bring the mail down? I’m curious how that works.)

But then we find someone with space on his mules, and it all works out. For $50, he’ll take our two large packs up to the parking lot. Money well spent! Poor mules, though — I feel genuinely guilty about burdening them. They carry our packs and I carry our guilt all the way up the hill.

A few parting shots from the Havasupai village:

We’ve been incredibly fortunate with the weather here — we had sunshine and blue skies for the past two days, and now the sky is blissfully cloudy for most of our return trek. It’s a relief to hike uphill in cool weather. And since I’ve already taken my photos of this terrain in sunshine, my camera stays tucked away for 99% of this return trip.

A few shots from the final stretch uphill — the sun is back out, and it’s beautiful:

I see the top… we’re almost there…

We sail through the eight miles from the village to the parking lot. Even the last mile and a half — which is directly uphill — doesn’t seem so bad. On our descent two days earlier, I remember passing by returning hikers who looked ready to pass out from exhaustion; I’m relieved we are in better shape (thanks to the weather and the mules carrying our bags). In fact, we make it from the village all the way to the top in three hours. We thought it would take six hours with our backpacks! Now we’ll get back to Los Angeles at a reasonable hour.

Once our gear is loaded back into the car, we drive an hour to the nearest restaurant — which happens to be at Grand Canyon Caverns, the same place we camped three days earlier. We already know what burgers we’ll order from the menu. There’s nothing like a big meal following a test of endurance, and this one hits the spot.

Since this restaurant is right next to the campground, we’ve already scouted a plan — following our meal, we’ll discretely walk next door and use the hot showers. It works perfectly. I remembered to leave a fresh change of clothes in the car and it feels SO GOOD to be clean again for our eight hour car ride back to Los Angeles.

Then it’s another hour before we get to Kingman, AZ and stop at Starbucks for caffeine. From there it’s a straight shot back to LA. We actually get to REI in Arcadia just before they close at 9pm so Irving can return the backpack he rented for the trip. And then we may have stopped at the Panda Express Innovative Kitchen in east Pasadena for dinner… despite the fact that we wanted “something healthy” like salad.

And now I’m working on editing video footage from the trip… tune in tomorrow for that!