Lower Sigua Falls

Hi, well this weekend, we braved the jungle of Guam again. We went again with a group of CGOs. This time there were 12 in our party.
I offered to take the group on another hike, this time in search of one of the pretty waterfalls around the interior of Guam. However, my caveat was that it would be a hard hike. Even so, I had a surprising number of people join us.
The trail began over very familiar territory on top of Mount Alutom. We took the same route as we did for several other hikes. However, this time we continued down the trail further. The landmark for our turn wasn’t a tree (as it was for Upper Sigua Falls), but a WWII Sherman tank.
You can see how happy we were to find it (there was only one small marsh to cross to get there…)

Here we all are posing in front of this tank that was brought here sometime after the war for target practice (no there wasn’t a battle fought there … although that would make for a better story).
Lance and Mario:

All the pretty girls in the group:

Here’s Anna and I:

From the tank, we descended into the jungle. In fact, we dropped down to the river valley floor and followed the very narrow, very murky, very deep river to the first water falls, Sinisa Falls. When we arrived at the top of the falls, it was pretty, but there was no easy way to reach the bottom. So, we hiked up the other side of the river bank, bushwhacked through some tough savanna grass and back down into the jungle. I wish I had some pictures of the stuff we went through, but I was more concerned with getting us safely back down to the river to take pictures. Sorry.
However, we all made it safely down, although not without our fair share of falls along the way.
Here we are making our way down the last little section of the ravine to get to the falls.

Anna coming down the rope, looking graceful as always:

This is me spotting “Mudslide” as he came down. 🙂


Once everyone got back down to the river, we decided it was time for a little relaxing in the water. Unfortunately, the pool wasn’t too large, nor was it very deep. It was refreshing nonetheless.
After we were cooled off, we continued down the river (which was the prettiest of all the rivers we’ve hiked though on Guam, thus far at least). Again, my camera was packed away in the dry bag because everything that wasn’t sealed or waterproof got utterly drenched on this trip.
So, after our second leg of the trip. This is the waterfall we were rewarded with (Lower Sigua Falls).
This was a much larger and prettier falls (you can get an idea of scale from the person in the left side foreground).

Here are some more pictures of us playing the water.




So, with nightfall fast approaching, we hustled up the bank. It was another steep trail, but this time it was well worn with a number of ropes along the way to assist us.
When we got back up to the top of the ridge, we were rewarded with this pretty aerial view of Lower Sigua Falls, where we had just been.

So, with that, we went back up the hill to our vehicles. We got back to complete a 7 mile round trip hike that went 1,200 feet down and back up again, and took just over 5 hours. It was not bad for an afternoon hike. I had a great time and hope that some of our friends from this hike will join us again soon!
Until the next adventure.
–Jim