Last week, during my school’s spring break my dad and I got the chance to fly out to Arizona to visit my grandparents. I had the idea for the trip about a month ago, and circumstances seemed to fall into place to allow us to get some plane tickets and quickly plan the trip. My dad pretty much left our itinerary up to me, which meant that I had plenty of lofty aspirations for hiking during the four-day stay.

Of course, many of those hikes were in the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, March is apparently a precarious time to plan a trip to the Grand Canyon. It would have been a three hour drive from where we stayed, and roads were reportedly unsafe and washed out from an unusually rainy winter. All these factors limited us to hikes that were a bit closer to the Phoenix area. While I definitely want to get to the Grand Canyon (especially to see Havasu Falls) sometime soon, the adjustment did not turn out to be much of a loss at all.