Church

So today I was able to give the Relief Society lesson. It was on the Baptism and the Gift of the Holy Ghost. I have a couple of really good stories about how the Holy Ghost has touched my life. My favorite just happens to be back in '98 or '99. I was out camping/hiking with a roommate and a roommate with her boyfriend. We were going to college in Logan, UT, but decided to take a week off and go to Zion's National Park in southern UT. I really like it there. Anyway we decided to go back country hiking. I can't even remember the name of the trail, but I know it wasn't the Narrows. So, we needed to get a permit to on this trail and when we went to the visitors center to pick up the permit, we were denied. "Tony the Tyrant" informed us that he didn't think we were prepared enough to go on this hike. We didn't have the proper equipment. Well, that was true, but we said we would go buy repelling equipment. How hard is it to repel? I have done it before, and it wasn't as if we were repelling far, we only needed to get down 10-15 feet. So he told us we couldn't do the whole hike, but gave us a permit to start at the end and then we could hike up as far as we could get, then turn around and come back out. Sure, fine, whatever. We decided since we weren't going the whole way, we would wake up later and go around 10:00 am. This was definitely the first mistake.

I had never been in 100 degree weather before, and it reached that, that day. I put sunscreen on my arms and face, but didn't put any on my legs. I was told this hike was like the Zion's Narrows and decided why bother since there wouldn't be enough sun to tan my legs. This was mistake #2.

When we finally got to the parking spot, I looked around to try and orient myself with the area. I also was trying to tell myself that the car was exactly across the canyon from this spot. I wasn't scared about getting lost, but I wanted a point to look forward to when we were coming back. I knew we were going back country and that none of us had done anything like this. We also didn't have a compass or map. We didn't feel we needed one since we were only going to follow a trail to the stream/river, then follow the stream until we were ready to turn back. So how lost could we be? Mistake #3. By now, you are probably thinking why didn't you turn around? Yep, I should have!

So we started going down to the river. The trail started several hundred feet up, and we had to follow the trail down a rocky/sandy trail to get to the bottom. I had never hiked in the desert before and wasn't familiar with rock cairns. I had read about them, but since I hiked in the mountains with well developed trails, I had never really seen them before and didn't understand what they were until we were 1/2 down. Mistake #4.

Once we realized what they were, we started keeping track of them and looking for other things we would recognize the trail with. We realized that we couldn't really figure out where we had just come from, but wasn't too worried since we weren't ready to go back yet. Mistake #5.

We finally reached the bottom and walked for quite some time. It was very pretty and we enjoyed our little hike. We had brought a water purifier and went to town drinking as much water as we could handle. We knew it was hot, but didn't realize it was 100. Finally we turned around and decided it was time to go. We knew that we had to climb the mountain in order to get out of this canyon. As we neared the part of the trail where we started going up the mountain instead of along the stream, we filled up our water bottles again. Now when I hike, I sure drink a lot. It is crazy the amount of water I drink.

We made it up to the last rock cairn that we remembered and that was the first one we started paying attention to. We couldn't see any others, and weren't sure which direction to go. We put the man in charge. I am not sure why we did this. Anyway, he decided to follow the footprints in the sand. Mistake #6.

Eventually we came to a ledge that was about 2 feet wide. We had about 5-6 feet to go up until we would be on stable ground, but it was on a very dangerous slant. We were all nervous to do this since we couldn't just walk up. All of us ended up crawling up, one person at a time until we were finally up. I was so scared. I really felt I was going to fall off the edge of the cliff. We scrambled up the sandy dirt to the top and when all four of us were up there, we breathed a sigh of relief. We were on the home stretch now....right? Wrong.

From here I could see the point I had oriented myself with at the beginning. I just knew the car was west of where we were. Other than that...no idea! Again we stood up and figured, it's not far now. Just walk west and eventually we will hit a road that will take us in the right direction. By now my legs were sunburned, I was completely filthy, and I was out of water. But we took off towards the west. After 10 minutes of wandering around since it was clear we weren't following a trail, we came across a rock slide of boulders. It was about 20 feet wide. Then after that, there was another one. I was tired and didn't want to boulder hop. It didn't look like fun, and since this is rattlesnake territory, I didn't want to go on the boulders and potentially disturb a snake. The other three seemed to have the same idea. We stood there for a moment.

Two of the people I was with were not LDS. My other roommate and I are LDS. So I decided to say a little prayer to Heavenly Father to have Him help us find the path. No sooner had I closed the prayer when some guy started whistling about 50 yards south of where we were. All four of us stared at him and watched him for a couple of minutes until he was out of sight. We all then tore off running towards the trail. In moments we were back at the car and enjoying very warm water. I know that He listens to my prayers and that He is always there to help. Thank you!!