Sand Hollow

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Another awesome thing that I have been craving for several years is scuba diving.  BYU offers a class through Dive Utah that enables you to become open water scuba certified within six weeks.  The best part is that it was $270 that I didn’t have to pay.  I received three scholarships and a government Pell grant this final semester at BYU.  So I had all my tuition paid for, all of my text books paid for including extracurricular classes with $2000 dollars back into my pocket.  What a huge blessing!

The class consisted of textbook course work, which really was just reading about scuba safety, equipment and practices.  Then we had four weekly sessions of getting in the local public pool at the Provo Rec Center and practiced using the equipment on top of and under the water.  Then we had two final sessions called open water dives at The Crater in Midway Utah.  It is an underground hot spring inside a small hill of earth with a whole at the peak.  Imagine a mini volcano in the middle of Utah with hot water instead of hot lava.  That is basically what it was.  It was such a relief to swim in warm water!  At the rec center we practiced in the competition pool which is always a little too cold for comfort!

At Prov Rec Center

The crater wasn't super exciting though.  They had put in some under water lights and a few platforms to stand on under water and look around.  The walls were all made of rock that wasn't too exciting, but we got to dive down to just over 30 feet deep and be able to experience the pressurization effects going down and up.  It was actually pretty difficult for me to figure out the buoyancy and becoming the same as the water around me so that I wouldn't float to the top or continue sinking to the bottom.  But I got scuba certified!

About two weeks later, my roommate and a girl from my scuba class and I went down to Hurricane,Utah just outside of St. George and scubadived at a reservoir called Sand Hollow.  It was gorgeous!  The red rock formations surrounding the water and jutting out of it here and there, the sparkling water and beautiful blue sky.  It was a perfect day for diving.  Dive Utah has had several donors place things in the water for the divers to seek out and find on an orienteering course. 

Me under water with my Gear

Under water shot of the sun

My Roomate Taylor and myself

Taylor, Carol Lee, Me

We set out and ended up finding the airplane about twenty or so feet below the surface and, a toilet, and a Volkswagon bus in other places.  Pretty interesting to see an airplane down there.  It reminded me of the book Hachet by Gary Paulsen, where the bush plane pilot was trapped in the airplane in the lake.  I was relieved to find the cockpit empty though. It’s too bad that there weren’t very many fish in the reservoir.  It would have been fun to interact with them.  Anyway, pretty fun stuff.  One of my bucket list items is to scuba in a temperate place and visit a reef.  That would be awesome. 

Airplane Nose

Cesna Double Prop

The Volkswagon Bus

On The Beach after our dive

Muscle Men!

My goal is now to scuba dive in a tropical reef!  that would be soo fantastic!  It would also be very cool to scuba dive in an under water cave, with a guide of course!  

Golden Birthday

I had my 25th and golden birthday!  I turned 25 on the 25^th of October 2013!  Man I am getting old!  But not old in spirit!  My mother has started a little catch phrase that she insists refers to me… “Logan Loves to Live.”  On my golden birthday this year I had already schemed for several months to go skydiving, one of my bucket list items.  My mother had wanted to visit my younger brother Brandon and I sometime this past semester and it ended up that she came to celebrate my birthday with me this year!  We had fun swimming at her hotel and playing cards and going out to dinner.  Then on Saturday morning we got up early and drove the three hours down to Moab Utah so that I could go skydiving! 

I chose Moab because it is in southern Utah where all of the beautiful red rock and incredible arches and towers are situated.  Arches national park was only a few miles away from the airport that I started at.  We got there and had trouble unlocking the gate to get in!  You had to enter the code and push immediately afterwards to open the gate.  But every time we tried the gate wouldn’t open.  But after a few attempts we figured out that we needed to push immediately and it was fine.  Inside the gate there were several hangers but only two of which were open.  Skydive Moab was the first, and the other was another skydiving company. 

Once there they handed me what seemed like a bundle of paper work.  They sat me down in front of a TV and played a short video about skydiving and the risks involved.  Then I basically had to sign my life away that I would not sue the company if something went wrong.   My mom didn’t like all of that but I didn’t really care.  Ever since getting sick, I feel like I have this attitude that even if something did go wrong nothing is as bad as what I’ve been through, so it doesn’t bother me at all to sign all of the paperwork, because I truly believe that nothing bad will happen. 

Then I suited up in this heavy duty blue jump suit.  Remember that this is late October in Utah.  Air temperatures were continually dropping in preparation for winter.  Though I think that the air temperature that day was about 65 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit.  Not cold but not warm either, at least for skydiving.  I honestly was a little disappointed with the tandem jumper I was assigned to.  I went up with another girl who was jumping and her tandem partner was even weirder.  They both seemed a little off, just strange, and made lots of weird comments and stuff.  Plus in the video I had them make of the jump they all made weird hand signs and faces too.  But I guess that is what you get in a remote area. 

So we got into the tiny single prop airplane and basically sat in the lap of our tandem jumper.  Once in the air the tandem guy hooked my harness to his so that we would jump together.  It is a pretty small airplane and climbing to 14,000 feet (10,000 feet above the ground) was no small feat for the little plane.  It probably took us fifteen to twenty minutes to get to the right altitude.  Then I was told to open the side door!  It was actually pretty hard to get it open with all of the wind pressure.  But I got it open and stepped awkwardly onto the step under the wind attached to the side of the plane.  I was still attached to my tandem jumper.  The wind was pretty strong!  Then my jumper counted to three and we fell out of the plane!

We did two or three flips and then leveled out, but I told him I wanted more so we started spinning around and around horizontal to the earth!  The view was fabulous!  Red stone for as far as the eye could see!  The distant Colorado Rockies standing tall and impenetrable miles and miles away, with the Colorado River underneath me winding and weaving through the low country of south eastern corner of Utah.  It was fabulous!  And I was moving so fast!  They say we were moving about 120 mph!  We free falled for about thirty seconds and then he opened the chute.  Then I got to float for another two and a half minutes or so.  He let me steer the parachute and I spun us around so that we were almost horizontal we were spinning so fast! 

It was great! When we landed I had to pull my legs up so that we could land on our bottoms into the dirt.  I felt like it was too fast!  I needed more time!  We should have gone up higher!  Think about how cool it would be to skydive with a squirrel suit!  But I went up and landed without problems! 

Skydive Moab Video

After my little adventure mom, Brandon, Christine and I all drove down the road and went to arches national park.  It is literally just up the road. We didn’t have tons of time cause we had a three hour drive back to Provo and I needed to be there to host a birthday party for myself.  But we drove through the park in wonder and awe for the incredible rock structures all around us.  They are huge!  And the craziest part is how they tower over you in an arch that really looks like it was meant to be there!  We went on a few hikes and stuff, and it was incredible! But pictures speak better than words!  It was a fabulous birthday!