Belated Utah Post

In (late) celebration of having visited Utah a month ago, I will now post about our trip. I would have posted earlier, but I was facing the task of going throught 1400 pictures, and that's no small task.

We planned out Utah trip around Jesse's marathon mission reunion. Enough said about that.

We were able to celebrate Easter at Grandma Karen's house, and Ian had a blast.




Kellan didn't really know what was going on, but he loved this hopping bunny that Karen got him.


Jesse's family was great and played with the kids a lot.


After Conference and Easter were over, we went camping down at Zion National Park. Wait. I meant to type, "after Conference and Easter were over, and all the SNOW melted, we went camping down at Zion National Park."

We were going to camp in the park, but just outside of it we passed some BLM land, which is free to camp on. No water and overrun with weed-smoking hippies, but free. As soon as we got there, Kellan was eating dirt and Ian was running around like a crazy man.

This is what bedtime looked like every night that we were there:




We stopped by REI and bought a double sleeping bag so the kids would be able to sap my warmth and sleep well. It worked well, except Kellan doesn't really sleep well if he's touching anything. Consequently this is what we all felt like after a long night:


The first day we spent in the park, riding the shuttle and going on hikes. It was very pretty.








Near the end of the day we were walking toward the Narrows and we almost got his by rocks. We heard thunder and I looked up and saw a rock falling. Jesse ran forward and I turned around and ran back the way we had come. It was so scary. I was running trying to cover Kellan's head, and rocks were falling onto the sidewalk all around us. When we stopped, there were pebbles and dirt all over our hair and clothes, and I was hysterical because I couldn't see where Jesse and Ian were, and because I had almost been killed by rocks. A tree was broken in half, the fence broken, and the sidewalk cracked. Luckily nobody was hurt.



The next day we hiked through backcountry to see Kolob Arch. All day I was twitchy because we kept hearing rock slides, and Ian kept saying, "A big rock fell and almost hit us!" The hike to the arch was 7 miles and we didn't start until noon, so we got back really late.






Ironically, we could hardly see Kolob Arch once we got to it. You can see it way better in the pictures. And you can hardly see it in the pictures.

The two days after that we played around on red rock with Janna, Jesse's sister, and her son, Tyler. We found some petroglyphs and some sand dunes up on a mesa. It was pretty fun.





Kellan just wanted to walk around on the red rock and step on plants:



After we got back from camping, we only had a few days left in Utah. We spent more time with Jesse's family, visited with Kristen (from freshman year) and her son Cole, and saw some other friends.


We had a ton of fun.