1. It is fun.
2. It makes you feel good. I love feeling muscles work for a good cause.
3. You get to be outside and enjoy the beauties of this Earth.
4. You get to have your whole family trapped together for an extended period of time because most hikes take at least a couple hours so hiking doubles as forced family togetherness under the guise of exploring canyons and lakes.
Anyway, so I've been researching family hikes (because some of us are still small and need things that aren't too rough) and today we headed out on our first adventure.
We chose to head up Little Cottonwood Canyon in order to wander our way to Cecret Lake. Neither Josh nor I had ever been here before so it was new territory for us, but our trail guide said it was a great hike from June - September so we set out.
As we passed the town of Alta, we came to a place where the paved road turns to dirt and gravel. That was on our printout, we expected it. What we didn't expect was that the gates would be closed and locked and no vehicles would be allowed in.
Ok, no big deal, we were there to hike and how far could it really be from the start of gravel road to the trail head at Albion Campground (we later learned it was about two miles each way).
And off we went.
Even though we were walking on a groomed road, it was still beautiful! The scenery was amazing and the views were incredible. I was loving it!
We saw lots of potguts (is that what everyone else calls them?) and squirrels and big, fat mice. We even found a sparkly, purple beetle that played dead for us to try to convince us to leave him alone (and we did after we flipped him over a couple times and he intentionally flopped right back on his back with his legs angles up into the air).
Because of the snow melt there was dozens of little, baby waterfalls and pools to look at. The weather was great, it was perfect...
...until...
we got to Albion Campground and the actual trail head for the Cecret Lake hike. That's when things started to get snowy.
Now, we are native Utahans so a little snow doesn't really scare us, but the problem came in the heaping piles of mushy, melting snow that were completely covering large sections of the trail. We could heave our way over the snow alright (even though it was really tall and very squishy), but we weren't entirely sure where the trail was. Sometimes we could find it when it came out from under its white covering, and sometimes we had to search pretty hard to find the next section of the path. Since we had not been here before we weren't confident in the necessary turns and eventually (after Aubrey put her foot through a layer of snow and landed in an undercut of frozen melt water that was running below the surface) we decided to save this section of the hike for another day.
So we didn't see Cecret Lake after all.
Sad.
Well, we swallowed our disappointment (actually, Aubrey wasn't very disappointed, she and her soggy foot wanted nothing more than to head back to the car) and ate our lunch and started back.
It really was an amazing day for a hike and it was honestly incredible to spend all these hours with the people I love best on this planet.
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| (Especially I love hanging out with this guy.) |
I guess the fact that we didn't make it all the way is the perfect excuse to go back and try it again sometime soon.
That sounds like chapter two of a really really great day.
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