The sun was beaming in the center of the valley as my family, and I arrived. Upon arriving at the parking lot, we began our hike towards the bottom of the valley in order to reach the crystal-clear river. The hike down was quite perilous as there were many big rocks in our way. After dodging many twigs, branches, and roots, we made it to the bottom of the valley. Here there was a beautiful blue river under an imposing cliff. To my surprise people were jumping from this cliff; I was amazed. I finally found my friend amongst the crowd. The boy with the red shorts was him. He was as amazed as I was seeing the people jump off. We knew we had to jump off, it looked like a stunning experience. However, little did we know this was going to be quite hard. Not only did we have to cross this wide and deep river, but also climb up this huge cliff hard of access.  

     We began to start the cross, the water was cold as ice. When we finally made it in, we now had to cross the river and go against this strong current. Both of us were drifting quite a lot, until we finally caught a branch and pulled us to the shore of the river. Our first step was accomplished, and we were already tired and freezing. Now it was a whole other task to climb up onto the edge of the shore. The rock was covered with algae, and we kept sliding causing us to have to start over from the bottom many times. Now we were on the very hot rock which was boiling due to the sun. Now we had to climb barefoot to the top. The hike up was quite hard due to the rocky terrain and the amount of people who had the same idea as us. Multiple times there were holes in the rock where there was water at the bottom. This would be super dangerous, if we fell. Getting us out if we had fallen would have been extremely hard and we could have gotten seriously injured. It was just like a natural well but without any fences around it. Due to the amount of people who climbed up with their wet feet, it made it super slippery and dangerous.  

‘Ahhhhhh’ my friend said. 

Looking around I saw that he had slipped but to my surprise he had not fallen to the bottom. 

‘Are you alright?’ I asked. 

‘Yeah, I didn't see this huge puddle, luckily I grabbed this branch, and it prevented me from sliding to the bottom!’ 

I was reassured that he had not gotten hurt or else that would have ended prematurely our jumping experience. We continued hiking to the top, now it was getting much more difficult due to the trail getting much thinner. Now when we had to cross one of us had to go on the edge to let the others cross, this was pretty risky. Multiple times we had to do that, and each time was scarier than the other as we had to move to the edge to let the others pass, I was surprised no one had slipped and fallen. We arrived at a spot where some people were already jumping, but it did not seem high and challenging enough. Together we wanted to jump off from higher. During the climb, we were careful. In the distance I saw people jumping from two to three times higher, it seemed like much more fun. We resumed our hike to the spot I saw, and before we knew it, we were finally there. It was high up here; much higher than the spot we had seen previously. I had already gone cliff diving, but this was the highest I had been. Leaning over the edge I saw people jumping, it looked like they were falling for ages until they struck the river. Other people who were waiting to dive told us to watch out for rocks hidden underwater. So, we knew we needed to jump where others were jumping and stay attentive. Subsequently we looked at others jumping analyzing where the others were landing. The question now was who was going to jump first. I wanted to since I had already done this before, and I was not sure if my friend had already done this. As I got ready to jump, I prepared myself mentally and physically. The tip to not be scared was just to not think about it. If you started to overthink it you would surely get scared and likely not jump. So, I took my courage into my own hands, took a run and jumped.  

     This jump felt like it never ended, in the air I was accelerating a lot, and the water was approaching very rapidly. During the fall, it was silent. Making a huge splash in the water, I tucked my arms in and dived deep into the beautiful blue water. Upon reaching the bottom of the water it had felt like the world had stopped again, but I knew I needed to get back up quickly to make sure nobody would dive on me. Upon reaching the surface of the water I swam back to shore watching as my friend dived in even though he was hesitant at first. I warned him to jump further.  It did seem that the jump took a while right until the water. As he got to shore, I congratulated him on his first cliff jump. He was so stoked about the jump and how long it had felt. This had been a marvelous experience for me and my friend and an adventure that is quite out of the ordinary, that I would remember forever. Little did we know this is what we would do for the rest of the afternoon.