Remember how bummed I was about our little back-to-school nature hike? Well, we made up for it yesterday! I discovered that the trick is to be in the real wildnerness, in this case 10+ miles on a rough, dirt road away from civilization, and even further from any sort of town. We went up to Kimberly in central Utah. Kimberly is an old ghost mining town south of I-70 near Fremont Indian State Park. There are just a couple of collapsed cabins left. Kimberly holds a special place in our family's heart because my grandpa worked there as a gold miner when he and grandma were newlyweds in the 1930's. Grandpa took us up there many times and told us the stories of his adventures there. Grandpa's been gone for more than 10 years, and now we take our own kids up there and tell them the same stories.
It was beautiful! The place is so isolated and so high up in the mountains that in the wintertime it was only accessible by sleigh. Almost the only "litter" we saw were old rusted cans and a few broken dishes from decades ago. This was not the trash pile that is the canyons near our home.
We saw:
4 deer
3 squirrels
1 wild turkey
1 snake
1 lizard
I got fir cones and acorns to last me for awhile. The kids got sticks and rocks (rocks with quartz in them!).
We went with Grandma, two uncles, one aunt, and eight cousins, plus the four of us.
Dallin and his best bud, cousin B.
Uncle W takes a bunch on the 4-wheeler. (They went very slow, so slow that Dallin was disappointed. But no helmets = VERY SLOW to this mom.)
Poor Sariah tries to keep up with Uncle V and the rest of the kids.
Later on we tried fishing at Shingle Creek. Sariah got distracted playing in the water. She went through two pairs of pants and we finally resorted to letting her play in her underwear. When all was said and done and we were getting in the car, she started screaming, "But I didn't get to go fishing!!!"
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