Hiking is a very therapeutic activity. It allows you to walk away from your stressful student life of homework, projects, midterms, professors, and those annoying kids who always break the curve on the test.

I don’t think it’s possible to be stressed on a hiking trip, because you leave the stress behind at the trailhead to relax with a few good friends. It doesn’t matter what you believe, hiking is a good rest for your mind, a good exercise for your body, and a good refueling for your soul.

When you leave your everyday life behind for a few hours it makes you feel all around healed. You can admire the beauty of the natural formations around you and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that you get from a really long hike.

Bell Trail 13 is an 11 mile round trip hike that runs parallel to Beaver Creek, close to the Verde Valley off of I-17. About 4-4.5 miles down the trail, the creek gives way to a breathtakingly beautiful natural swimming hole.

Here is the website for the trail:

http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/coconino/recreation/red_rock/bell-tr.shtml

I heard about this hike from one of my friends on campus and it presented an exciting challenge to me. Armed with a 4 liters of water in my camelback, some snacks, and a ton of sunscreen, a couple of my friends and I began the hike. Between the three people on our hike we carried about 12 liters of water in at the beginning of our hike.

On this particular Saturday we were experiencing a bit of a heat wave, and though we hadn’t really seen temperatures above the low 80s in Prescott, we faced temperatures in the upper 90s on the hike. Being college students that don’t like to get up super early, and having gotten lost on the way to the hike, we began our trek close to midday.

Most of the hike runs up on a hill off to the side of Beaver Creek, so there isn’t much shade and the sand path and rocks around it heat up and begin radiating heat back at you. The hike out to the natural swimming hole was pretty intense. We climbed down to the creek a few times to cool off for a while before continuing on our hike. Throughout the hike we had to continuously drink water trying to keep up with the water that we were losing to the dry hot air through our skin.

By the time we got to the swimming hole we were absolutely exhausted and between the three of us we only had a liter and a half of water left. But seeing the beauty and experiencing the cool crisp water of the pond made the hike totally worth it. We stripped down to our swim suits and jumped in.

This is me treading water in the cool, clear pool of the natural swimming hole on Bell Trail #13.

There were several places in the swimming hole where cliffs over deep water provided safe places to cliff dive. I’m a bit of a chicken when it comes to heights, so I jumped off of the smaller four-foot cliffs while my brave hiking companions leaped fearlessly from the twenty-foot cliff into the cold water below.

20 foot cliff that my friends dove from.

The water in the swimming hole was pretty clear, and much colder than the outside air. Jumping into the water felt like a total shock to the system. The guys I was with kept laughing at me when I continually surfaced very dramatically in reaction to the cold after jumping off my four foot cliff.

The landscape around the swimming hole.

Looking down from the 20ft cliff at the swimming hole.

Once you climbed out of the water, it didn’t take very long for the water on your skin to evaporate and the breeze to become warm again. We hung out at the swimming hole till close to 6 p.m. when the sun was no longer high in the sky and the air began to cool a little.

I brought a $7 Disney Princess backpack from Walmart on the hike filled with extra supplies and my friend and fellow Aerospace Engineering Senior, Justin Gross, volunteered to carry it for a good portion of the hike after I started struggling with the heat.

Although two of us brought towels on the hike, we didn’t actually need them. We soaked our clothes in the cool creek water before hiking out and by the time we made it to the car again we were all completely dry again.

When I spend so much of my life being mentally exhausted from my studies, being physically exhausted after a beautiful hike was a satisfying change. The feeling of accomplishment that I walked away with was amazingly uplifting, as was the general sense of awe that I felt at the swimming hole. I’d definitely do this hike again, but I’d start way earlier in the morning on a day that wasn’t quite so hot.

I elected to take summer classes at Embry-Riddle for the first time this summer. I don’t have any exams this week, so I’m taking the opportunity to catch up on my blogging. My main motivation for taking summer classes was that I’ve reached a point in my classes where I couldn’t take any more courses at a university near my home, and taking classes this summer would mean a less stressful senior year.

I’m taking 6 credit hours this summer with Linear Circuits Analysis and Advanced Engineering Math. This will leave me with 14 and 9 credits for my last two semesters.

So are summer classes easier or harder than classes during the regular semester? Well, the answer is both.

On the one hand, summer classes run at a much more elevated pace than classes during a regular semester. What you would normally learn over 16 weeks is covered in only 6 weeks. So the way you study is different. You have to do your homework every day or you’ll get lost and pretty soon you won’t have any idea what’s going on in your lectures. The positive side of the faster pace is that you are usually fresher on topics for your exam, so it’s a bit of a trade off.

On the other hand, you only have classes 4 days a week and without overloading yourself with classes or extracurricular activities, you have 3 days off a week.

There are some students who do still have extracurricular activities like the Jet Dragster Project, NASA Space Grant Research, or in my case Newspaper. There is a lot of paperwork and organization that needs to be done over the summer to make sure the newspaper runs smoothly the next year, starting with our Orientation issue that has to be organized and printed a week before orientation.

So my weekly schedule is basically as follows:

MTWTh – 2-6 hours of homework, 0-3 hours on Newspaper, and 3.2 hours in class (which usually averages out to 8 hours/day),

FSa – Camping, or hiking, or hanging out with friends,

Su – 5-8 hours of homework/studying, then recovering from FSa

During a regular semester, between a full course load, and extracurricular activities, your average engineer gets very few days off. Once the engineering student reaches their junior and senior years, it is not unreasonable to expect that they will not get one day off for a month or more at the end of the semester, and by the time you’re on Christmas or summer break, you really need it.

From what I’ve experienced and what I’ve heard from other engineering students, it takes about a week for us young college students to recover from our semester, so if you can avoid work for the first weeks of your school breaks, you’re much better off. We were given a week between the end of Spring ’10 finals and the start of Summer A ’10 classes.

Actually having weekends during the summer is an amazing gift for an engineering student. I have taken the opportunity to engage in outdoor activities as often as I can, and it is these activities that will be the focus of my summer blogs.

Here is a glimpse of what my summer schedule and weekends off have looked like so far (detailed blogs to follow for select events):

Last Final of Spring Semester: May 6

Hiking to the top of Granite Mountain: May 7

Seeing friends graduate: May 8

Summer Classes Start: May 13

Camping at White Horse Lake: May 14 – 15

Hiking to Sycamore Canyon: May 15

Going home for my father’s 50^th Birthday Celebration: May 20-23

Hiking in Sedona: May 30

Open House for printing company that prints our University paper in Tempe, AZ: June 4

Hiking Bell Trail #13 at Beaver Creek: June 5

Hiking Humphrey’s Peak: June 11

The rest of my summer in Prescott will probably look something like this:

June 18 or 19: ? Hiking to the base of the Grand Canyon, maybe?

June 19 or 20: Recovering from my “grand finale of the summer” hike

June 25-28: Studying for and taking Summer A Final Exams.

June 29: Flying home to Spring, Texas.