Orderville with Andy

My adventurous summer continued into September with an invitation from Andy and Emily to hike Orderville Gulch/Orderville Canyon with them. I love slot canyons. LOVE THEM so I couldn't say no. It was kind of short notice and a little tricky to get work off but as I've been able to do with every other trip this year I managed it. They called me on Monday, I picked up some trekking poles on Thursday and Friday we were heading South. We camped that night in Zion and grabbed a few geocaches and ice cream cones in town. It and the first time I'd been down there in years and the first since they had the trams going. They worked out really well. Andy and Emily made some blue cheese mac'n'cheese for dinner, Emily's brother slept in the car, Em and her mom took the tent and Andy and I just rolled our bags out on a tarp. It was so warm in fact I think I was only half in my bag that night.

In the early early morning we caught a van up to the top of Orderville which is a tributary to the Narrows. It's shorter by a few miles but has a little more canyonerring involving some ropes and swimming along the way. We hiked for awhile and saw some great rocks, grottoes, slots, plants, tree jams...then we hit the water. We tried to high step it and stay dry at first but by the end we'd all gotten dunked more than once and had to swim with our packs over our head or throw them to each other and jump in a pool. We had to rappel down some really cool spots with boulders and waterfalls. I tend not to be in a lot of those shots as I kept going down first and taking everyone else's picture. A few times all you could think of was getting to the end and putting on those dry socks you knew you had in your pack. We got back as the skies turned gray and we heard thunder up above. The last couple miles through the Narrows were a lot different and I'm glad we did Orderville instead. We grabbed some Elk burgers in town before the long, tired, dangerously sleepy drive home.

Group picture at the beginning...all dryThese are a few of the first obstacles we came to. They got better and and better but unfortunately there was more water at each one and eventually we were over our heads and swimming and it's not too easy to swim and take pictures at the same time so some of the best stuff I can't show you.

The first jump. It was pretty cool at the time but eventually we all had to do some that were worse.

This the official Zion National Park sign in the canyon. The tax payers really paid a grundle for this one!

This is my favorite picture I took. It was at the very end of the day in the Narrows.

Group photo at the end about 10 hours later and all wet.

Another Amazing trip! Thanks Andy and Emily!

Hike to Wolverine with Nate-O

I’ve been hiking around Brighton since I was born but for some reason I’ve never made it to the summit of Wolverine. My brother Nate offered to take me up so off we went. I hadn’t been on a really big Brighton hike since Andy and Nate took me up to Sunset when I was 17. They still make fun of how much I complained so this time I made sure to keep my mouth shut. We left pretty late but the weather was perfect. We didn’t even need jackets and there was no sign of the big storm that was predicted. It wasn’t even windy at the summit and along the ridge. We started by going up to Twin Lakes over the ridge above Wolverine Cirque to Wolverine and then Mount Tuscarora and down Catherine Pass past the three lakes, Mary, Martha, and Catherine and back to where we started. It was a fantastic hike and I’m glad I finally got it out of the way. We expected to see more people since it was Labor Day weekend but we only saw 2 or 3 people along the ridge and a few campers below Catherine Pass. (Although Nate commented on the fact that whoever had gone up before us left boot prints like Nutter Butters and that was all we could think about for the next 4 hours) I loved being able to look down on all the lakes and see Brighton, Alta, Salt Lake, and Heber all around you. Next time I think I’ll try to leave earlier. By the time we got to Lake Mary it was officially dark, my knees made me want to cry, we both had to go to the bathroom, and Nate was being buzzed by bats. Our patience for adventure had reached its limit and we got back to the cabin less than an hour before the storm arrived. I’m a new fan of those trekking poles. They made the last 3 miles bearable. Now the only Brighton peak I have left is Clayton. The hardest part of the hike is done. Top of the cirque looking towards Wolverine along the ridge. Nate's there somewhere on the right. Just below the Wolverine Summit. Looking back along the ridge where we just came from. It's a big deal to ski down this in the winter although it's notorious for avalanches.

Me at the top of Wolverine! Hooray!Looking down from Tuscarora to the three lakes below Sunset Peak. Mary, Martha and Catherine. I couldn't get a good shot of all 3 at the same time.

Millicent looks pretty tame from up here. You can see Twin Lakes on the left and Mary on the right. Nate on the summit of Tuscarora. On the way home down Tuscarora and Catherine Pass. Sunset peak is off to the left.

Where does zucchini go when it dies?

In to my kitchen for Berry Upside-Down Cake! It's zucchini heaven. I thought I'd post a recent recipe I made on here since the majority of my spare time at home is cooking. Sometimes when people come over I find myself standing behind my kitchen counter talking to them even if I'm not cooking because that's where I'm most comfortable. This is a recipe I posted on a friends food blog. Let me just preface this with the fact that I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't put food where it doesn't belong. Pepper shouldn't be in cookies, cinnamon and sweet things don't belong in stew and raisins don't belong anywhere. That being my opinion I don't eat zucchini bread... ever. My mom sent me a recipe to use all my yellow zucchini I have in my garden, a CAKE recipe! Gross! But I tried it because it was either cake or the compost bin for a few of those things. One girl can only eat so much yellow zucchinis. It originally called for yellow squash but I didn't grow any this year. I made it and then I tweaked it and made it a few more times and loved it more each time. The last time I made it I was attempting to find a way to get the jam to stay on the inside of the cake. I assembled each of the two cakes differently to see which would work better. Then, when I dropped the experiment version of the cake, the one I had the highest hope for, on the hot open oven door and watched batter and jam run into the bottom of the oven, all over the door and through the hinge onto my kitchen floor I thought, "Forget it, let them conduct their own experiments! I'm done!" I renamed the recipe and updated it with all my tweaks. It is the moistest, tastiest amazing yellow cake I've ever had. I love it! I've eaten 3 of them almost entirely on my own justifying it each time by saying out loud to myself, "It's ok, it has zucchini in it!"

Berry Upside-Down Cake

1 Box Yellow Cake Mix 1 C. Pureed Summer Yellow Squash or Yellow Zucchini 1/2 C. Water 2 T. Vegetable Oil 3 Large Eggs 3/4 C. Sour Cream Boysenberry Spreadable Fruit Jam 1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 2. Cut up squash or zucchini into chunks and puree in a food processor. It can be a little more than a cup. Mine always is. Add the water and puree some more. 3. In a mixer, combine the cake mix, squash puree, oil, eggs, and sour cream. Beat on low till combined. Beat in Medium for 1-2 minutes. 4. Spray 2 round 8 or 9 inch cake pans with cooking spray. Spray it thicker than you normally do. (Or one pan and 12 cupcakes. An 8 inch pan makes a thicker moister cake) 5. Add half the batter to the pan, then drop the jam all over the entire cake in small spoonfuls. The more spread out it is the more consistent looking it will be when you turn it out. I used about 2/3 of a smaller jar of jam. 6. Cover with the rest of the batter and bake at 350. 20-25 minutes for cupcakes and 25-30 for round cake or till the top is light brown and springs back when you touch it. 7. Let it cool in the pan for about 15-25 minutes. Run a knife around the outside of the pan and turn it upside down onto a plate. Don't try to force it out or the jam will stick to the pan. Let it sit there upside-down till it drops out. Keep it covered or it dries out fast and gets really hard.

Berry Picking with the Tolls

Every year I try to get up to Idaho to go huckleberry picking with my sister and her family. This year I made it up and we picked for a whole day and that night Jailynn made us a pie. It was so good we couldn't even wait for it to cool down before we ate it. Then the next day we picked currants and raspberries in the back yard and ate them with cream. The whole weekend made for some tasty food, fun pictures, sore backs, and purple fingers...

There were so many berries we couldn't even stop to eat lunch and ended up with huckleberries all over our bagels. Yum! Evidence of a hard days work! Hmmm...both the fingers and the pie!

Even Sugar helped with the raspberries.

Down The River With Bryce

So last June my oldest brother, Bryce, called me up to say he was going on a river trip and thought that I should come along...oh yeah and it's next week. I'd resolved that from now on if it was ever at all possible to go out on an adventure I wouldn't say no. I'd just received my tax rebate check for the same exact amount the trip would cost and I had plenty of vacation time so I debated about it for a day or two and then said yes. The debate was really about whether I'd feel safe or not. I went repelling with Bryce once and found the experience a little reckless. Plust the last time I went rafting with Bryce he was the guide and it seems like he fell off the boat a dozen times at least. That was a long time ago though and I think we've both gained a little more experience since then.

The trip was amazing! No words really to describe how fun it was. It consisted of 4 days rafting down the Colorado River from Moab to Lake Powell through Cataract Canyon at peak high water. In fact it was higher than it'd been in years. We got a deal since one of Bryce's friends had a son working as a guide. Bryce flew in and we picked up a few last minute things for our trip like head lamps, hats, etc. Then we drove down early the next day with Doug and his sister. When we got there we saw how high the river really was since it had come over the banks and flooded the playground in the back of our hotel. We'd watched a few youtube videos of cataract canyon at high water and I was getting a little nervous...and excited too.

The first couple days were spent floating down the river. It was pretty relaxing. For the most part all the people in our group were pretty cool. Bryce and I enjoyed making up funny nicknames for the ones that annoyed us...well the one that annoyed us. We had 3 guides, Bryce and I, his friend Doug and his sister, a rich but super fun family of four from Sacramento, 3 old guys who'd been college buddies, an older couple from Taylorsville, and a friend of one of the guides who had a crush on the other guide. Camping at night was as much fun as the time on the river. The first day Bryce and I explored a little side canyon for quite a ways before it rained all night. It rained all the next day too and we had to build a make shift shelter on the raft out of tarps. It was still fun. Later that day we hiked "The loop" where you get off the raft and hike up and over a horseshoe bend and the raft picks you up on the other side. We saw a few granaries which were cool at first but all started to look the same real quick. We hiked up to see some petroglyphs and pictographs...and granaries...which pretty much look the same up close as they did from the raft.

The next night it didn't rain and we saw the most amazing stars. It was dark enough that you could even see the whole moon due the moonshine even though it wasn't full. We hiked up to "The Dollhouse" in Canyonlands and climbed around some little slots and saw some amazing views. It was a pretty good hike going up from the river and when we got back they had a big bowl of shrimp cocktail waiting for us. They seriously fed us so good. Cesar salad wraps for lunch, steaks, banana pancakes, lasagna, it was great! We even had crackers and hummus for appetizers and dessert every night.

The rapids on the third day were incredible. Bryce went in the small boat with the one guide on the oars. I stayed in the big boat where you didn't need a helmet. I think if I start talking about the rapids I may never stop. There were walls of water 30+ feet we'd go over and would smack us in the face. Not waves, walls. Huge deep pits we'd go into almost totally vertical. Usually cataract is a series of large rapids with cool names like Satan's Gut, Hell To Pay, etc, but at high water it all turns into one big boiling mess that looks like the sea during a hurricane. Bryce and I made it through safe but about 50% of the boats flipped that day. We helped flip a couple back over and saw one that went all the way to Lake Powell upside down. The people on it had to hitchhike rides on other rafts. Google "Cataract Canyon Highwater" for some good videos of what it's like.

Our last night we camped in the Tamarisk and it was kind of boring. Bryce and I passed the time playing scrabble and wishing we had a deck of cards but I stayed late on the raft that night and we slept without our tents which was pretty cool. We ate some good steaks and used the "groover" for the last time. That's the "toilet". Bryce and I renamed it the McGrubber after the SNL sketch and surprisingly a number of people were calling it that by the end.

The last day of rapids were pretty fun. I got to ride on the very front of the raft and even though the rapids weren't as big that day I got a much closer look at them. We had a nice float down through what used to be the mouth of Glen Canyon but what is now the tip of Lake Powell. Bryce and a few others took a cold flip into the water. It was my first time ever seeing any part of that lake and it wasn't much. We got out at Hite, took a quick group picture, got on a van and headed up to the huge airport they have there... not to be confused with just an ordinary picnic table. Soon three little planes arrived and we got on them for an amazing ride back to Moab. They flew us up over the river and the confluence where we'd gone the previous 4 days and then all over Canyonlands. It was incredible and I couldn't take my eyes off the view... even though I puked at least 6 times. After a nice dinner in town it was back home and back to real life.