It has been months since our halls boomed with the incantations of witches, but the late arrival of a post on the subject is fitting because Jason and I were slower eradicating Halloween this year than ever before. Usually, our crows and maggots are stored away prior to Christmas, but it’s February, and they were only just barely caged. Yes, this year, much more than others, our party experienced some lags.
This year, Jason and I dressed as Victorian circus performers. I was Marvelous Mabel, Tightrope Walker Extraordinaire, and Jason was Leopold Leotard the Great.
Knowing we would be in Europe for half of October, Jason and I wisely started our party preparations extra early. Then, in a momentarily lapse into idiocy, we decided to transform our basement into a wizarding world, a process that required new props and the imaginative rethinking of space. Why this year of all years? Floating candles don’t just float themselves into existence. (Do I need to roll for a sanity check?) Thankfully, we had some transformation help. Over the years, decorating for our event has almost become an event in of itself. On an evening or Saturday afternoon, friends gather and catch up over pizza and creepy scene setters. The conversations are lively, and the assistance is enlivening. This year, Adam even popped in from Washington to put up a few cobwebs; bedecking our spooky halls is that thrilling. Thanks Lee, Drew, Simone, Jacob, Rowley, Adam, and Keith for lending us some of your mystical brainpower and pushpin skills!
Constructing floating candles out of toilet-paper, paper-towel, and wrapping-paper tubes sounds like a short task- it wasn’t.
Jason and I attempted to recreate Hogwarts’ charmed ceiling by painting a long strip of gossamer.
Beyond the hefty task of decorating, fashioning the favors for our party always represent a different type of challenge. Trying to guess the correct combination of adult, teenager, and kid gifts needed is difficult. So, this year, Jason and I opted to give our guests plenty of options from which to pick what they favored, with some appealing to multiple age groups. We assembled 36 kid bags, 12 wizard wands, 24 gothic toiletries, and 20 tween grabs.
The adult favors this year were gothic toiletries from The Bubbling Cauldron, which I dressed up in black.
It was Jason’s brilliant idea to tie the tween bags with rope nooses.
Jason and I arrived home from Europe only days before our get-together. We had pretty severe jet lag the night of our party, so we almost nodded off while tallying the costume contest votes. It’s kind of comical having 85 guests in your house while you can barely stay awake.
We created a selfie spot for Azkaban’s most wanted.
Professional photos are available at our event, so attendees can capture their magnificent costumes.
Not everything was more complicated this year though. Dinky Donuts took some of the common headaches out of catering for us. Their desserts were hot, fresh, and yummy. Better yet, this food truck arrived on time and was ready to handle orders precisely when anticipated. Yeah! That’s a first for our food-truck luck.
The Bingo table is always packed with players.
The preferred craft this year was customizable Harry-Potter-themed potion necklaces- a Rachel original.
Cleaning up the piles of cups and sticky crumbs after our shindig also went much quicker than normal thanks to some kind helpers. Benson, Rowley, Milo, Drew, and Simone all pitched in. You know you’ve mastered the universe when He-Man vacuums your house for you.
We added shelves to a wall and topped them with all the makings of great magic.
Throwing our annual Halloween party is always exhausting, throwing it while experiencing jet lag was almost laughable. A big thank you to the assistants that graciously lent a hand or wand; you are more enchanting than a Scourgify spell. And a thank you to our friends and family that have made this shindig a fall ritual; it wouldn’t be a 17-year-and-still-running tradition without you.
Sometimes life doesn’t turn out exactly as imagined. Some events aren’t as dramatic or romantic as anticipated while others are more remarkable than expected. Here are a few of our fall experiences that proceeded as predicted or as unpredicted.
Activity: The Cannon Ball
Expectation: Awesome
Reality: Awesome
It’s impossible for a steampunk pirate ball with vintage dancing not to live up to expectations.
I wouldn’t actually make a good pirate; plundering goes against my core values.
Activity: Archery Tag
Expectation: Fun and Energetic
Reality: Fun and Tragic
We invited everyone in my family to play archery tag with us one evening, including all our nieces and nephews. I learned a few things about myself and the world during this strung-out activity. It turns out, my family as a conglomerate isn’t particularly skilled with bows. We lost most of our games against another family consortium.
Our tag team was rather ragtag.
You know those wrist guards that Legolas wears? Well, I guess they are for more than just elven frills. Midway through our tag session, I wacked myself with my bowstring while shooting. It hurt, and I instantly grew a goose egg on my forearm that looked ready to hatch. A few days later, half my arm turned a sickly shade of green. My Dad walked away from the affair with a similar limb wound.
With a few insignificant differences, I am remarkably like the heroically-flawed figures of myth. Eons ago, an arrow hit Achilles’ foot, his weak point, and everything fell apart. Playing archery tag, an arrow hit my foot, my weak spot, and everything fell apart. (Sure, I didn’t slay Hector, and I wasn’t exactly a champion of the Trojan War, but I’d say those are pretty insignificant differences.) Just minutes before our time in the arena was up, a guy on the opposing team saw my foot sticking out from behind a barrier and decided to target it. This wasn’t just any of my two feet though, it was the foot I had tendon surgery on years ago. His arrow flew, hit that surgery spot spot-on, and hurt me like hell. (Sorry, I can’t edit that last comment; the pain was too real for censoring.) Jason heard a loud smack and then a wretched scream. Play stopped, and I hobbled off the field. I held back my tears though; I’m tough in my flimsiness like that. My ankle swelled up so badly I had to elevate and ice it that night. I could barely walk for a couple days, and I couldn’t run for a week and a half. D#mn puniest point!
My ankle inflated after getting shot.
Activity: Wheel-Thrown Pottery
Expectation: Ghost
Reality: Coarse and Clumsy
It’s really easy to misalign your clay blob and form a wobbly mess.
As a gift to Jason, I purchased a month of wheel-thrown-pottery classes for the two of us. He envisioned a Ghost-esque experience, but it ended up being more like a 2nd-grade art class. You know, making misshapen blobs that only your mother could pretend to love. At least that’s what Jason would tell you, but I was pretty pleased with our creations. I enjoyed the classes enough that I signed up for another month of them with my mom. She and I had a great time working clay and forming rookie pieces together.
Despite Jason’s protestations, most of our pottery pieces turned out satisfactorily.
After another month of pottery lessons, the quality of my creations… stayed about the same.
Life isn’t terribly predictable. Excitement and drama don’t always pop up in the places we envision. Yet, pop up they do.
Yes, I’m back to blogging after some temporary impediments (AKA life).
Orderville Canyon, rated a 3B III, is one of Zion National Park’s famous slot canyons. This fall, my father organized a family outing to this narrow ravine with one of his friends as our guide. More family members ended up joining this expedition than expected, so our group of nine wadded and jumped through frigid waters as an odd entourage.
The Canyon Overlook Trail is short but stunning.
No matter how hot it is in Zion, the park’s slot canyons don’t offer much heat. The sun can’t reach into those deep and slim crevices, and the icy waters that seep through stone to fill their innards assure that no passer retains what limited warmth is offered by the air. However, the rest of the park does not share this all-too-efficient cooling system and was blazing hot during our stay.
The Canyon Overlook Trail provides a touch of adventure.
Jason and I went down to Zion a day earlier than my family and completed two hikes. We did these at both ends of the day to avoid the sun’s most intense beams. During the morning, we took a 3.5-mile trek to a fantastic viewpoint of the Watchman, a spire that overlooks the valley holding Springdale. In the evening, we hiked the Canyon Overlook, a short one-mile jaunt with a gorgeous endpoint above Zion Canyon.
Birch Hollow is one way to enter Orderville Canyon. It’s not the way we came in, but we stopped there long enough for me to slip on a loose rock and fall flat on my face.
The next day, we got up at an ungodly hour to begin our slot adventure. Hiking Orderville involves a one-way journey down a thin gap that empties into Zion’s famous Narrows almost two miles from the Temple of Sinawava. Only 80 permits/day are given to enter this canyon. The distance is 10-12 miles, depending on how far along a bumpy dirt road you dare go in your vehicle. We did the 12-mile version. We started walking at 9:15 AM and barely caught the last shuttle out of the park from the Temple of Sinawava at 9:15 PM. Yup, those 12 miles took us 12 hours. One mile an hour? Perhaps a little pitiful. This trek is supposed to take 7-10 hours, so we were about 25% slower than normal human beings.
Our rappel off the Border Boulder ended right in a deep mud pock.
Why so sluggish? For one, our group was relatively large, so each rappel took considerably longer just based off our numbers. Second, our group was relatively timid, so prompting its members into freezing pools of unknown depth wasn’t always quick. Why rush into misery?
The thing about hiking slot canyons is that there isn’t a go-back option after a certain point. Once you make your first rappel, you are committed. So, even when an obstacle makes you think “I can’t do that,” you know you must. It’s both intimidating and empowering. In this case, our first rappel, and the point of no return, was a 15-foot drop off a chunk of stone known as the Border Boulder. Once our ragtag group bounded beyond that rotund pebble, we were past retreat.
Our group wasn’t exactly A-team material.
The Guillotine, Orderville’s second rappel, falls between two massive boulders wedged into the canyon’s slender gap. A cold and cloudy pool obscures the rappel’s landing. While only about a 12-foot drop, the unknown depth of that water made us all hesitant to get harnessed up. Thus, Jason got elected to take the first descent into its indeterminate deepness, an honor he was not terribly excited about receiving. It turned out to only be about three feet deep, so no one had to attempt detaching from the line while swimming.
The Guillotine sits in a hazy pool.
Orderville’s terrain and obstructions change frequently, more than most slot canyons’. Each flashflood alters the sand levels and debris clogs, shifting the wading, swimming, and maneuvering requirements. Beyond the Guillotine, the landscape went from a little wet to much worse for us. This section, officially Bulloch Gulch, is commonly called the “Orderville Waterpark” or the “Obstacle Course.” Somehow, frigid water escapes the towering canyon walls to gain mass and momentum here. This runoff is opaque with a turquoise hue, similar to glacier runoff. Therefore, the depth and subsurface conditions of its puddles are impossible to ascertain before jumping in. We had to wade nearly constantly once we hit this section, and we crossed at least three or four pools that required full swims. There might have been a few more… we lost track.
Our encounters with Orderville’s fluids began innocently enough.
A friend warned me that wearing a wetsuit or drysuit is necessary when maneuvering through parts of Orderville, regardless of the temperature outside. I didn’t believe him. Zion was 102 degrees the day we trekked through Orderville, hardly wetsuit weather. So, with the exception of neoprene socks and amphibious canyoneering shoes, Jason and I passed on donning aqueous attire. Bad decision. Continual plunges into icy puddles combined with constant shade created by high canyon walls meant we all were soon shivering uncontrollably once the swims began. My body has a hard time staying warm anyway, so I was hit by fiercer shivers than most. Jason said I turned pale and my lips went blue. It’s been a while since I’ve been that cold.
Slippery logs and rocks are frequent hurdles in the Waterpark.
Our last rappel wasn’t planned but was necessary. Veiled Falls, a waterfall, is typically only around six feet tall, but it’s the most frequent search-and-rescue site in the canyon due to people jumping from its ledges and breaking their ankles. To get past it without snapping our limbs, we concocted a makeshift rappel line using Jason and my dad as the anchor. Designing this workaround took a bit of time and left our shaking bunch even more dejected.
With all the shivering, I couldn’t keep my hands steady enough to take pictures. All of my photos turned out a bit blurry once we got substantially wet.
Due to our slower-than-average pace, we didn’t make it out of The Narrows before dark. We had to wander down nearly a mile of the Virgin River in the pitch of night. Wading through a flowing waterway when everything is black around you is an interesting experience.
Veiled Falls made us snappier, but it didn’t snap us.
The consensus on Orderville? It was unimaginably beautiful and unbelievably cold. The experience, a jumbled bundle of misery and majesty, will never be forgotten. While others from our group might not be eager to experience it again, I would be game. A wetsuit would not be considered optional attire though.
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