| rev:text
| - So when my husband and I decided to try this hike on our first time vacation to Arizona, I read a lot of reviews here to see what to expect as I am 7 months pregnant! With that being said, for a little background, I am very active, still run a few miles a couple times a week, strength train, and workout probably 5-6 times a week. Pre pregnancy I have run 2 marathons and many half marathons. All of these reviews are SO subjective and depends on the condition and ambition of the climber in my opinion. We decided to do Cholla trail as it said it was the easier of the two. I loved it and we made it to the top!
It definitely was not EASY. I took us 3 hours from start to finish. I would say the first half was the "easier part" if you want to call it that. It was average steepness but definitely tests you endurance. At certain points I looked and saw my heart rate was nearing 160s during this part. After that, it definitely gets pretty steep and requires some climbing, getting low, holding onto rocks,etc. It was definitely worth it when we made it to the top. The views were great.
While up top, we talked with a few other climbers that made it up from the other side(echo canyon trail-they both meet at the same point) and the reviews were mixed. Some said yes, cholla was the easier side but some said echo was easier. This was because echo is steeper and harder to climb but there are less loose rocks. Cholla is not as steep but more chance to slip etc. But again all in the eyes of the beholder I guess.
We got there at 9am which was a bit later than I wanted but BRING LOTS OF WATER! More than u think! We grabbed some bottles from the hotel and went through all of them. We drank 6 normal sized bottles between the two of us and could have had more.
I'm sure they get a lot of inexperienced tourists just showing up to climb so they had a couple rangers sitting at the bottom of the trail that were really nice and saw my belly and warned me that it was a double black diamond trail! They jokingly told me that they never delivered a baby on the mountain and didn't really want to today! I told them that I was very active, read all the reviews, did all my research and would take it slow and turn around if I need to! I definitely got some looks on the way up as well as some "cheers, I can't believe you are doing this, and way to go's" but so glad we did it! Definitely not an easy climb but I would say intermediate-advanced for the newbie semi active person. It's also nice that you could turn around at the halfway point or whenever it got too hard!
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)