Long Time, No Blog!

Sorry about the lack of blogging lately. I have been really busy lately planning a baby shower, going to family events, and things of that sort.

Let me begin by telling you all about our magnificent hike! We started at the trailhead at 6:45 am last Saturday so that we would have plenty of time to complete our monster hike. We were taking a trail called Jacob's Ladder which is notorious for being insanely steep and horribly rocky and slippery. It sure lived up to it's reputation. I was slipping all over the place and I was covered in dirt by the time we finished "the ladder." After the ladder there was a hill sort of thing we had to get over and it seemed to take a lifetime to get there. We had to take a stop under a nearby tree on this portion while it poured down rain. Luckily this only lasted for about 3 minutes. After we got over that stinkin' hill, the hike was easy cheesy! I was skipping through meadows and playing in rivers. The weather was nice and cool and the trail was FLAT. I felt so great!

A little after this point in the hike you kind of lose the trail and have to begin following cairns (little rock piles carefully made to tell you which direction to go). We thought we were totally following the cairns then suddenly...no more cairns. We couldn't find a rock pile anywhere! We wandered around for a bit and Tony even climbed over some tall rocks to see what he could see. We decided to go down to the river and follow it back to the last cairn we saw. We successfully retraced our footsteps and somehow got lost...again. So, we retraced once more, and found a trail, finally! Only to find out the the trail actually took us DOWNhill...the opposite way we were going. Frustrated and disappointed, we stopped and ate our lunch. We felt kind of dumb until we heard on the news just a couple days ago that two hikers got lost when they lost the Jacob's Ladder trail on Lone Peak. So, we're not the only ones!

We had fun watching the deer prance through the meadows, and we even saw a badger! I, unfortunately, made friends with a fat squirrel when I was "using the facilities" in the wilderness.

After lunch, we decided it was too dangerous to keep wandering around because it was about 2pm and we wouldn't make it back before dark. So, after trying so hard to reach the summit, we turned around and headed back down the mountain.

(there is a church talk in this somewhere, I'm sure...this is not copyrighted, feel free.)

We met up with some mountain man who told us we lost the trail like a MILE back from where we were! What the? We weren't really sure how we did that but we shrugged our shoulders and braced ourselves for what we knew was ahead...going DOWN Jacob's Ladder. I was cranky and hot and not in the mood to fall on my butt the whole way down so I grabbed on to Tony's pack and held on for dear life. We made it down the Ladder and celebrated when we saw the sign indicating the end. We were sure we were so close to the car that we would be there in 10 minutes or less. About half an hour later, we hit a dead end. We somehow took a wrong turn and ended up on an ATV trail. I was ticked...so ticked. My feet hurt, I was sunburnt, and I had already been lost enough for all the hikers on the mountain that day. I told Tony that if we got lost again, I wasn't going to be able to make it. I was running out of energy fast and if we didn't get to the car soon, I'd have to stop for a pretty lengthy break.

We found our trail and made it back to the car! We stopped at McDonald's and got some yummy food (there was no way I was cooking dinner) and rested the rest of the night. Too bad all that night and the whole next Sunday my knees were literally not working. I couldn't move. BUT--at least I didn't get attacked by fire ants and stung by stinging nettle 500 times like our last hike.

It was a really fun experience, and one day we are going to try to hike it again and get to the summit, but I'm not sure either of wants to anytime soon. We are planning our first camping trip for next weekend-ish. I've never been so we're going to a campsite to test out our "gear" and make sure I can hack it. If that works out, we might just do Lone Peak in two days so that we don't get any cranky Hollies. Those are not nice creatures at all.