Feb 14th- April 10th

Valentines

I have to admit... Greg is pretty amazing, flowers and chocolate covered strawberries on Valentines! The best part is that he made the strawberries earlier that day too! What a great guy! Love him!

This is a picture of a couple of my favorites, Paige and Rylee. We headed to Greg's sister's house for a birthday party for Paige, had a great time with family and watching the kids run around in their princess dresses.

Stansbury Mtns

Where??? I had no idea where this place was til I met Greg. It's the mountain range just west of Grantsville/Tooele. We took off snowshoeing there, hoping to make it up on the ridge to get a good view. Unfortunately for us, the clouds settled in around 9,000 ft and snowed on us the whole day. It was a blast and still made for a fun day in a new place.

Capitol Reef- Spring Canyon

Taking advantage of southern utah and sunshine!

We had a few days off of work and school, so we decided we needed to do some winter backpacking. Instead of heading up to snow in the mtns we headed down to snow in the
desert ;-)

My first petrified wood! It was such a glorious moment and sooo exciting to find this!!!

Lots of snow and ice. A little chilly too. We had to navigate down this crack in the walls to drop into spring canyon. We hiked to the head of the canyon and then hiked all the way down to the bottom. We took our time and made it a few day trip.

Love camping in amazing places that are in our backyard

The south facing side of the canyon didn't have any snow (that's where I tried to be, in the sun!), but the north facing side was always in the shade, therefore, still covered in snow(not where I tried to be ;-).

Got some bouldering in on the hike down! Greg conquered this big piece of sandstone.

Me too!

Amazing star and moonlit nights.

Wingate Sandstone Rock Formation. Very shear beautiful red cliffs, my favorite formation of southern utah.

The geology is another reason to go and enjoy this area.

The black rocks are all volcanic from the now extinct volcanoes above the canyon floor.

A small slot canyon for the runoff and flash floods to continue to erode until... it is 100 ft deep... in about 10,000 years, hard to think in geologic time, its so big and sometimes hard to wrap your mind around.

The Navajo sandstone was amazing. The canyon narrowed and we had 1,500- 2,500 ft cliffs on both sides all the way to the canyon floor. Definitely don't want to be down here during a flash flood, there's no where to go, whereas in the wingate formations you have the debris slopes to go up. This lower part of the canyon was very impressive and worth a trip back if anyone wants to go ;-)

Hanging out on a natural bridge

One of Greg's nightly duties, cooking dinner.

Beautiful end of a fabulous trip! We hiked out on a great day, tired and without a ride up to our car at the head of the canyon. All in all we hiked over 20 miles of canyon, but now we were looking at a 15 mile hike back up to our car. Our only alternative... hitch hike. So as we walked up the lonely road back to our car we had our thumbs up hoping that a nice soul would stop and pick us up. To our great surprise, we were picked up by a truck after only walking a mile. They took us a few miles up the road, then it was back on foot for 10 min and then a truck pulling horses stopped and let us hop in back. It was awesome we got to our car within 30 min instead of like 4 hours.

Wasach- Snow Sampling

Guardsman Pass

One of Greg's projects this late winter- early spring has been hiking up the canyons to gather snow samples. I've had the oppertunity to go with him a couple times and was rewarded with a great workout, amazing views and getting to play in the snow.

The first thing we do is dig a big snow pit to the ground. That's always fun and reminds me of building snow forts when I was younger.

Bells Canyon

Last saturday was an absolutely beautiful spring day and we were up in the snow! It made it really nice though because it was warm and I didn't freeze!

Greg even sported a t-shirt and shorts while hiking up; don't see that very often while snowshoeing!

We had to hike up past 9,000 ft, so after about 4 hours and a 4,000 ft gain we stopped in this little meadow. We started digging and kept digging, still going....

The snow was over 9 ft deep! Crazy!

It takes a couple hours, but we get 2 clean core samples and have to put them in bottles and nothing can be contaminated. It's a little bit of a process, but not to bad.