Expedition 3—Canyonlands and Arches! By Evan Harr

Our third expedition was my favorite one so far! We went to some really cool national parks and little towns. These included Arches National Park, Canyonlands, Moab, Grand Junction, and more! My favorite places were Canyonlands and Moab. Canyonlands is one of the most amazing national parks that I have ever been to! It is literally a giant land of what seems like to be never ending canyons! The name is pretty self explanatory. Moab is an awesome little town in Utah with some fun things to do.
So, we started our expedition on a bad foot. We landed at about 9 at night, and one person barfed in the van, and another got out of the van and wouldn’t come back in. It was a rough first night. I’ll admit that I was also causing some problems when we got to the campsite. To top it off, in the morning there were another two people acting up, and their actions caused them to be on intervention with Jeremy for a few days.
While those two were gone, we stayed a campsite right outside of Moab, literally next to the Colorado River. We went into Moab and went to this sweet diner where I got an awesome dessert. I got a cinnamon roll where they took out the middle and put a giant scoop of vanilla ice cream in the middle and pecans with a sugary caramel sauce on top. It was delicious!
We had some nice nights there until I went on TAG for two days for an act of violence, which I regretted right after I did it. It was my first time being on actual TAG. We still had fun at the campsite (which was right outside of Moab), especially when we were filling up wash bins in the Colorado River, and we would usually fall in because it was a fairly steep drop- off.
For a few days, we kept going to Arches National Park. The first day there, we went to the famous Delicate Arch, and a storm came in when we got to the arch. It was extremely windy, and I even saw lightning in the clouds right above us, and felt the thunder shake the ground!
After we got Miles and Andy back in our group, we went on to a different campsite near our rock climbing site, called Ice Cream Parlor. We had a lot of fun rock climbing! Miles climbed blindfolded, and Mitch climbed with a lot of determination after he said that he didn’t want to climb! I got a little nervous when I got higher, and I didn’t have the right shoes to touch the very top, but it was still pretty cool.
The next day, we tried going to Double 0 Arch, and got lost along the way. It was really fun because we started finding different little paths to go since we didn’t have any idea where we were supposed to go. We just explored and ran around and climbed a little. I really enjoyed it!
After all that, we headed to Canyonlands! We stayed for a couple nights. On the second day, Nick disappeared for the whole day, and that made Tim leave for most of the day, and he had to call the sheriff and a Search and Rescue team. We were very excited when Nick came back, but then the next day Anne gave him the unfortunate news that he is no longer in our group or in SOAR semester. I will miss that kid, because he was always full of funny jokes and interesting facts.
We had a very fun Halloween, and it started off with the two staff dressed up in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Halloween costumes! After that, we had two teams compete in a fun trivia game to earn candy, then we had an awesome dinner where we put chicken, potatoes, cheese, and mushrooms wrapped in tin foil into the fire, and took it out and ate it. It was so delicious! After that, we pulled up the van next to the fire and had a dance-off to Michael Jackson music! It was really fun/ funny, and Mitch and I won! We picked candies, and I picked a big bag of Skittles, and Mitchell got gum. The rest of the contestants picked their candy. Staff picked gum and split a pack of gum in half and had a dare to jam all those pieces in their mouth at once! It was one of the best Halloweens I have ever had!
Anyways, after that we decided to hike in the backcountry of Canyonlands, but all the backcountry sites were taken. So, instead we camped at some awesome campsites out of the van. The first night it had an insane storm with some insane winds! It was pretty cool. The next two nights were average desert nights—very hot in the day and very cold in the morning and night.
Overall, it was my favorite expedition so far this semester, and I am looking forward to the next expedition! We are landing in Vegas and having Thanksgiving there! All I really know after that is that we are going to the Grand Canyon, and I have never been there before! After that we have a mini base phase, then we have parent weekend/ banquet. Then we have the whole month of December for Christmas break! This semester has gone by so fast!