I have limited time today so I will do this on the computer. At lunch with my boss today, he mentioned his son would take his family to Havasupai in a few weeks. This made me think of near misses and false alarms, two of which come to mind.
One was in Havasupai in 2006. This was during a period of significant instability in my life. I wasn’t doing well in college (I would drop out that semester), and only worked a few hours a week as a webmaster for a small art gallery. An acquaintance from an old-school photography class I was in had a friend drop out of her trip to Havasupai last minute and asked if I was interested in going. Never one to turn down an adventure, I was thrilled.
While Havasupai itself was outstanding and worth experiencing, the trip was awkward. About ten college students were in the group, all friends from high school and a decade younger than me. I’ve never enjoyed large groups, but to be in close quarters for a week with a bunch of spoiled rich kids was lots of fun. I made attempts at making connections, but the age and socio-economic gaps were too large, so I made the best of it and went along for the ride. Looking back, they probably saw me as the creepy guy with a camera.
The hike down to Havasupai is long, hot, and brutal. We planned to drive straight down from SLC to beat the heat and hike in the dark. This brought us to Vegas around dusk, so, of course, we had to stop and ‘cruise the strip.’ The details are as you might imagine. Several cars had to change drivers, and we witnessed a fight between two prostitutes that was broken up by the police. The anguished cries from one of them, clutching her hair, became the theme for the day “…my weave, my weave!” All of it made me sad and ashamed to be human.
The hike down the canyon in the cool, starlit darkness was incredible. We got to camp in the late morning and slept until the early afternoon. As we milled around and set up camp, an enthusiastic guy who was there being filmed by the Discovery Channel, came by and offered to take our group to see Havasu Falls, which he said was the most fantastic sight. He was right. It is beautiful and amazing in every way. All of us trapsed over every inch of the falls, jumping off, swimming, and having a great time. What we didn’t know is that a Japanese tourist had been murdered in that same spot a few days earlier.
In the following days, when we heard about what happened, everyone was understandably shocked but didn’t seem too concerned, polluted as they were by the invincibility of youth. If I wanted to contaminate a crime scene, there would be no better way than to let a bunch of college kids play in it for a few hours. No one seemed to think this was odd when I mentioned it, however. At the end of our trip, as we were packing up our cars, officers from the Bureau of Indian Affairs were there, investigating. I filled them in on the details, and they wrote down my information, but I never heard from them. In the end, someone from the local tribe confessed to the crime. You can read more about it here.
These are some film images from the trip. I tried doing darkroom prints from the black and white roll, but nothing I did looked as good as the default scans from the developer.
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