Cookies with Simon

Simon came over to my house while Nate and Carrie went on a birthday date and we made her cookies. Simon helped with every step.

A weekend in Grand Junction

I've never been out to Grand Junction Colorado, but I hear it's nice and it's right there by Colorado National Monument, and Aaron invited me out for the weekend, and the weather was nice, so I went ahead and just drove myself out there. Why not.

It's a pretty boring drive but just around this rest stop near the turn off to Moab it starts to get interesting. I stopped to eat my sandwich and let myself get excited looking at the rocks in the distance. It was a fun weekend, but the only thing I took pictures of was the hike in the Monument. It was so pretty with the snow and tons of animal tracks and hardly anyone out except a few climbers which I watched enviously from the ground. It would have been a perfect day to be climbing red rock cracks.

We walked a leisurely 5 miles to a tower, found a sunny spot to eat a snack, watched the shadows edge down the pinnacles and cliffs and hiked back. I loved the shapes and had a nice creative time making up my own mythical stories about what they each were and how they got there.

In the distance you can see the skinny tower we hiked out to.

The hike back was going too fast and it gave me the random urge to scramble up a steep slope and try to find my way down another way...

Aaron waited at the bottom to conduct a little business on his phone while I went on my own personal adventure... I brought him back souvenirs in the shape of rabbit bones I found in a little alcove at the top.

Sunday after church we drove most of the road along the rim at the top. The viewpoints were awesome and always took you right out to the very edge of a big drop off. We made it out to look down on the hike we'd taken the day before. It's nice from the top, but I prefer the hike along the bottom for sure.

And then I drove back home to Utah. It was a nice little weekend away.

"The only other sound's the sweep - Of easy wind and downy flake."

I wasn't planning to make a post about my latest snowshoeing because seriously, hearing about someones solo snowshoe hikes just gets old after awhile I imagine. But then Megan wrote a post about deciding which poem she should memorize and one of them was Robert Frost's Stopping By Wood On A Snowy Evening, which reminded me so much of my Saturday afternoon on the trail to Lake Blanche that I thought I'd throw up a few pictures. It was uneventful, and because of that it was wonderful. I turned around after 2 very steep miles, saw almost no one, it snowed the whole time, and I found the most perfect lunch spot ever sitting on a fallen log over the river. It was so incredibly quiet and the wind was doing the prettiest things with the snow on the cliffs above me. Sometimes I wish someone was out there with me to enjoy the day with, but this time I didn't. I really enjoyed having it all to myself, even more than I usually do. (after so many fieldtrips and never spotting any snowshoe hare tracks for the kids I was starting to think I just wasn't recognizing them, but they were unmistakable and all over the place along this trail. They must have had some kind of snowshoe hare party that morning)

(more creative tree graffiti...unless this person's initials are BBQ which would be pretty cool too)

(a lone juniper. It seemed out of place up here)

(The view from my picnic spot. Right by the road too but the river was even louder than the ski bus chugging up the canyon so I didn't even notice)