August

We enjoyed ourselves for the month of August. Much of the summer was absorbed by church camps, the new house, and my ridiculous garden. So we finally took a little time to do some fun family style things. This was on our hike to Timpanogos Cave.

The shot is from our day at Lagoon. We had an unfortunate experience that reinforced Paxton's fear of roller coasters. For starters, it was almost dark, as you see, and we were headed up the first and largest hill of the wooden roller coaster when we suddenly stopped on the incline and had to sit there for about 20 minutes. Then workers hiked up alongside us and said the sensors thought there was a "ghost train" (their words) sitting still on the track so safety mechanisms wouldn't allow ours to move. So Paxton was mortified already and then we started up the hill without warning. But hey, we'll save money not going to Disneyland!

Finally we got out to one of our favorite camping spots. It was pretty warm but the boys did a couple of good hikes without complaint. It was a shorter trip so we used a tent and stayed in a primitive site. Next summer we need to make up some serious camping time.

Some day I'll do some nice paintings from photos like this. There is amazing scenery all over Utah.

The little canal you can see here is near where we camped for a couple of days. Paxton enjoyed himself here, but this was Bennett's turn to hate us. He kept saying he would "die on the rapids" so he got out a little earlier than Paxton. But, he did paddle by himself across one of the lakes, even though he felt he didn't have great control, so we were proud of him.

I was fortunate to go on a group day long hike (about 9 hours) to Box Elder peak above Alpine. It was really pretty - but sometimes really steep - and these wildflowers were so abundant it was like they'd been planted in someone's yard.

We had a big anniversary this month so we took a trip to the Moab area. This photo was taken by another hiker who believed pants were optional. Thankfully he had a long shirt. He was from France and had come to Wyoming to see the total eclipse.

Here is the Fiery Furnace portion of our hike fest. We ended up getting in 20 miles of hiking in a day and a half, some in Arches and some in Canyonlands (below). Crowds weren't bad so it turned out to be a great weekend down there.

We were in Canyonlands at sunset and the view at this part of Island in the Sky was stunning.