Fourth of July Weekend

So... I lost my camera. I'm not really sure where it is and I've looked in my house, I've asked the property manager 3 times if he seen it, I even looked through the car of one of my friends (sorry Emily), hoping I would find it. I have no clue! Anyways, so I decided to depict our 3 day weekend in the form of stick figures. You'll see....

We went down to Goblin Valley Friday night.

The sunset behind the plateau and hills was absolutely beautiful! I felt like I was looking at a water color.

Saturday morning we decided to hike Little White Horse Canyon which looped into Bells Canyon. It was a slot canyon which provided a lot of shade for us and it was fun to explore. Below on the left is a picture I took off of Google and the picture on the right is Matt in a similar scene. (Love my art skills?!)

However at one point we got out to the open and it was pretty scorching hot. When we were done with that, we thought to do another hike but thought we should cool down first and so we sat for a while and played some card games.... however we never really cooled down. The shade was even hot!

Chillin' by the fire.

On Sunday morning we packed up and headed off to church in Hanksville and then off to the Capitol Reef to a little town called Fruitas. Can you guess how it got it's name?

The Mormon settlers planted fruit trees here! They'll let you can eat right off the tree, but unlike my picture there were no fruit on the trees yet. It was too early in the season. Fruitas is hands down one of the cutest small towns in Utah I have ever seen. If it wasn't in a national park (they wouldn't let me live there) I'd want to move here---especially with fruit trees on every corner.

In Capitol Reef we hiked up Sulfur Creek. This reminded me of my Right Fork Canyon experience in Zion's during Labor day , except the sun was out, the creek was warm, and I had complete confidence I'd be out of there before night fall. (3 hour hike) (Click here to read about that trip.) There were mini water falls we got to climb around and the water wasn't even chilly!

Again, I have the picture ont he right of what it really looks like and my depiction of Matt & I. :)

My dad is in town and so we thought we'd come back for July 4th to spend time with him. When my dad comes to Utah there is nothing more he wants to do than to hike or to go camping. He loves hiking. We let him choose the place and we were off. When we started he said, oh by the way the first 700 feet is pretty much directly up hill. Well... yes the first 700 feet were directly up hill, but then the parts after it weren't that much easier either. Although Matt and I had been hiking Saturday and Sunday, we weren't ready for the 90 degree up hill hike. On the other hand, my dad couldn't have been happier.

Regardless of the strenuous climb, hiking with my dad is one of my favorite past times. He helped me look for some igneous and metamorphic rocks for my classroom and taught me a few things about rocks that I didn't know before.

Later that night we bough some fireworks and decided to hang out at home and just light our own fireworks in the street. We wanted to see if any of our neighbors were home so they could do it with us, but alas, it was just us two. It was fun for me, I'd never did fireworks before!

After seeing Matt throw a firework into the air and having it land on our lawn, turning the surrounding grass black and then trying it again only to have it come inches a way from catching our neighbors american flag on fire.... I can see why my parents never bought us fireworks.

Happy July 4th!