Day 12: Helicopter Ride Out of Havasupai

 Day 12: Helicopter Ride Out of Havasupai

After getting up at 3:20 AM and packing up our tent in the Havasu Falls campground, we shouldered our packs and hiked with the heavy backpack and 3L water packs up the steep hill past Havasu Falls and across the makeshift wooden bridge. Here, we dropped them at the mule pickup spot and said goodbye to our Group of 7 who were hiking out. We hiked much more slowly in the dark with our headlamps and making one wrong turn to the village of Supai, a total of two miles. There, we were about tenth in line for the helicopter ride out of hte canyon. It is first come first serve. The earliest people were there at 4 AM. We arrived around 5:10 AM. You hang your packs on a hook and sit on a bench and wait. It was very cold int he village with the breeze in the trees and I was shivering in my thin exercise shorts and shirt (appropriate for the hike but not for waiting around). So I went in the grocery store and splurged on a $20 cotton Havasupai mule train souvenir T-shirt to at least help a little bit. When the sun came up later, it got warm enough I did not need it anymore. At 8:46, a man came out and took your cash ($100 each) and added your name to the list. It was a bit chaotic with one couple trying to cut the line and others would have none of that! Then we waited. The first helicopter arrived at 9 AM, but all the construction workers and Natives got to cut the line. They also sometimes just took gear with them in the cargo net or back seat of the chopper. We waited until 1:50 PM before it was our turn! That's nearly nine hours of just sitting around. Had we the strength and stamina, we could have hiked out the eight miles by then, but that 2400 ft elevation gain in the last mile and a half would have been brutal. The flight itself was only seven minutes! Boom! We were back at the parking lot, the mules had taken our backpacks, and we drove 65 miles back Indian Highway 18 to Peach Springs and our crappy hotel.