Little Wildhorse Canyon - Part 2

Fresh mountain streams, snow on pines, the smell of rain on deep red slick rock...ok, I seem to have recovered from that last blog.

We woke in the morning, drove a mile or so to the trailhead, and hiked into the canyon. Little Wildhorse Canyon is probably the most family friendly slot canyon in Utah. It has only one place requiring kids to be hoisted up (about 10 feet), is relatively flat along the bottom, is only 3 miles long, has no places that you have to swim (just a few puddles), has plenty of places for kids to climb on the sides of the cliff and, yet, is narrow and deep enough to be breathtaking.

At the beginning of the hike Forester took a drink out of Julie's drinking tube and when he pulled out the tube his tooth came with it. That was his first tooth and he was quite concerned for a while.

Check out the pictures and movie clips that we took by clicking here.

We had a great day exploring the canyon. After leaving the canyon, we drove to Goblin Valley State park and hiked among the goblins for a while.

-Justin

Little Wildhorse Canyon - Part 1

We are going to try and see if we can fit in all of the places in Utah that we've always wanted to see before we go out East, leaving Zion and true wilderness to enter the land of rolling hills that you can't backpack in unless you want to end up camping next to a hundred other people, mountains that barely meet the definition, and scarcely a square mile of land not broken up by roads, civilization, and traffic. Just check out this link and compare Utah to Pennsylvania.

The lack of green shading and the convergance of masses of yellow lines are symbols of prison bars: the crisscrossing metal of a cage and a small room without as much as a potted flower.

Gosh, I hope it's not that bad; we'll have to see.

On that note, we set out to go and hike Little Wildhorse Canyon in the San Rafael Swell. San Rafael is a "protected" land in the way that it's protected, Republican land where you get to go to sleep at night to the sound of guns being fired at small animals and beautiful red rock formations that took millions of years to form and an instant to be forever marked by lead, the whine of two stroke motors driven by people that enjoy nature in the way that an arsonist enjoys good architecture, and "a good place to put your tent" means that there are fewer than three fresh cowpies in a square yard. Aside from that, though, it's a huge area of central Utah big enough to sometimes find a piece of peace and quiet adventure. We found a nice little place to camp where the sound of gunfire was distant, the cowpies dry, and we had only one atv drive within 50 feet of camp.

Wow, this post has turned negative enough that I don't think it's possible to recover and describe how wonderful our hike was the next day in this beautiful slot canyon. So, I'm going to have to write a second post.

-Justin

Yellowstone

We spent a wonderful, long weekend at Yellowstone on June 5th through the 8th.  With only a few days of notice, we were invited to stay at Dr. John Covey's "cabin" in West Yellowstone. I made the mistake of trusting to Google Maps' directions and we ended up driving about 20 miles out of the way on rough, skinny dirt roads on the outskirts of West Yellowstone. At about midnight on Friday night we finally managed to find the huge, 3 story, 40 bunk, beautifully furnished home. We slept in on Saturday then headed in to the park. It had been a dozen years since I'd been to Yellowstone and Julie had never been. We spent the day hiking among the hot pools, geysers, mud pots, and steam vents. The kids loved seeing Old Faithful.

The next morning we awoke late to find quite a surprise, about an inch of snow on the ground with it still coming down hard. We listened to Christmas music as we drove back into the park. The snow made the younger pines along the miles to our first hike of the day look like fields of Christmas trees. The buffalo grazed in fields with 3-4 inches of snow on the grass and on their backs. We hiked about a mile in to some hot springs while it still snowed.

We spent a few hours checking out various hot springs until the Park Rangers opened up the roads that they had closed for the snow and we went to see Yellowstone Canyon. The waterfalls were beautiful and the run-off from the melting snow created small waterfalls running down the canyon walls to join the huge ones created by the Yellowstone river.

We went to bed early and slept in late, cleaned the house, and came home on Monday. It was an unforgettable trip.