Lake Powell Adventures

The camera that we had for 3.5 years broke on this trip to Lake Powell, so I couldn't get the pictures off the card for a while. However, I couldn't help posting about this trip. When we left we were a little worried about the weather. It was showing that there would be high winds on Friday night. We learned a valuable lesson: don't go to Lake Powell if they are forecasting bad weather. It just isn't worth it.
It did start out fun. Here is Ellie with Grandma. Ellie really did like the boat and was a champion about wearing her life jacket.
We spent Friday (the supposed windy day) in canyons close to our camp. Here we are hanging out under a cool overhang in Lost Eden Canyon. (I might be wrong about the canyon.)Ellie's cousin Anna came with us. Cute little girls!Well, on Saturday we woke up and the wind was too strong to want to go anywhere on the boat. So we hiked up the canyon behind out camp and found this cool cave.
You can see the water in the distance.
An arch!
We stayed in camp for all of Saturday and were really blessed because our camp was in a low spot that meant that it was mostly sheltered from the wind.

On Sunday we woke up with nice weather and traveled about 13 miles up lake to Forgotten Canyon, ironically named because we will never forget it. It really was a beautiful canyon though. We ate lunch in this beautiful alcove area.

Uncle Marc took a turn holding Ellie while we explored the rest of the canyon.

We hiked up to some ruins called Defiance House. It was a pretty good walk up there. I wish we had taken a picture looking out into the canyon. We were surprisingly high up.


On the way out of the canyon the wind seriously started to pick up. We stopped by this floating port-a-potty and ended up staying and staying. We got there about 3 in the afternoon. At about 5 we thought the wind had died down enough to try to go out in the main channel and head back to camp. When we got out there, we found out that the wind had definitely not gone down enough. Wave after wave came over the front of the boat (hence the death of the camera), and we decided that there was no way we were going to make it back then. So we headed back to the port-a-potty. The wind was very strong. Spray would be lifted up from the lake and hit the people in the boat. Fortunately, we dried out okay though before it got dark.
Unfortunately it also got cold. We had twelve people on the pontoon boat. We had two sleeping bags and a couple of baby blankets. My dad pried open the custodial closet and John, Ellie, and I spent the night in there. There were ventilation openings at the base of the walls so the wind still got through, but we were a lot more sheltered than the people outside. However, we were still very cold. The only warm part of me was where I held Ellie: all night long. Needless to say I was way past cramped muscles. Sitting on the cement was less than comfortable, and I won't even talk about the smell. Ellie at least slept for most of the night. She woke up a lot and would cry (she lost her voice for a couple of days after we got home), but we would sing to her, and she would go back to sleep. Poor Anna did not sleep that well. Sometimes I noticed that Ellie would wake up when Anna would stop crying. Poor girl. It was perhaps the worst night's sleep of my entire life. (That includes labor!)
In the morning the people outside were freezing, and it was starting to rain. We went to shore and built a fire. We tried to feed Ellie breakfast which she threw up all over herself. That was the breaking point for me. So sad to see my little girl shaking because she was so cold and then to throw up all over herself. We ended up being let in a houseboat for a while to warm up. Then we went back to camp, packed up, and went home. It definitely was an adventure. For the record, we do want to go back to Lake Powell again. Just with some lessons learned: don't trust the weather forecast, and bring warm stuff on the boat (just in case).