Room+8B

Trystan and Cody

The South Kaibab Trail (You guys hiked Bright Angel) was an amazing experience. The scenery was beautiful. The rocks were mainly white because of the calcium deposits from fossils and tinted with red from iron. We hiked down the trail a couple miles and hiked back, and saw a lot of cool stuff! We saw sharp cliffs that were a straghtaway to death if you fell, we learned that the canyon was once a shallow sea and a desolate desert at one time, we also learned that the canyon is made out of many different layers, the oldest being 1.8 billion years old and the youngest roughly 2 million years old, and that it was formed by DUDE: Deposits, Uplift, Downcut, and Erosion, and we stood on a fault line! How cool is that! We also got to see fossils of million year-old seashells and mollusks on the rim. The very first expedition through the Grand Canyon was is 1869, led by John Wesley Powell. I thought that this hike was truly amazing. I'll never forget it for the rest of my life.

I thought that the rafting trip on the Colorado River was really cool. We saw the greenish waters of the river, the cool rock formations by the river, one example is an arch, a rock formation that looks like a half circle carved into the rock, and we saw petroglyphs at the rest stop. We even had lemonades that was in a sack dangling from the boat in the river! They were good! We learned that the river was at uneven lengths, in some places at 3 feet deep and in others 75, and that the canyon is falling apart before our eyes! The evidence that proves it is that there were many boulder piles alongside the river. We also learned about the Great Unconformity, where two layers of rock are on top of each other and differ in age by about a billion years! The rest of the rock just eroded away. I loved the river trip. I hope I can do it again!



Wupatki National Monument was awesome. It used to be an Anazazi settlement about 1,000 years ago. We saw an old arena that was used for sports, the actual living quarters, the kitchen where they grinded corn, the trash room, the blowhole, which circulates air to and from under the ground, and even the amphitheater, the place where the elders of the tribe would hold meetings. Because of the way it was built, you can hear someone whispering across the amphitheater! We went to the visitor center/gift shop next. It was so cool and really fun! It was certainly amazing.

Sunset Crater was fantastic. It is actually an old volcano. It was named Sunset Crater by John Wesley Powell because the rock was the same colors as the sunset. Wupatki was almost destroyed by the last eruption. The people actually fed their crops to the boiling lava to tell the gods please don't do this again. We also stood on lava! That's awesome! Although we never hiked up Sunset Crater, I still had a great time.