Viva La Spring Break!

This is my kiss of love to the warm weather of Southern Utah. Three cheers for Spring Break!

For Spring Break we went to Salt Lake for a few days, visited family, ate some Cafe Rio, and went to the Draper Temple Open House (which is INCREDIBLY gorgeous). Then...

We went to Zion's National Park! Since My Dad's fiance is so fabulous, she let us borrow her convertable, since her and my dad were in Colorado anyways: my Dad to hunt, and Justie to take pictures. :) The weather was in the high sixties, surely warm enough for a couple of Loganites to drive in the canyon with the top down.

Jayson was VERY excited about this.

We set up camp and found ourselves very proud of ourselves. It was our first camping trip by ourselves, without any other people. We set up everything, built a fire, and cooked dinner on it, all by ourselves. Twice.

All grown up. hahaha.

The first day we saw the Weeping Rock, which is this really great rock that weeps. You see, the top of it is apparently very weak, and water can go right through it, but as it goes lower the water can't go through, so it comes right out the side and makes these goregous water lines!

We also hiked Ange's Landing, which was amazing. We went clear to the peak of a giant mountainous rock!!!

we climbed all the way up there. So awesome.

And there was a really great tree with crazy roots growing out of the rock up at the top!!!

The view was SPECTACULAR! Well worth the hike.

Then we hiked the East Temple Hike. When they said this path wasn't well paved, they surely were NOT kidding. For about 1/8 of the hike there was a nice path. Then we climbed thousands and thousands (1100 to be exact) of feet up rock like this:

I figured that once we got to the top there would be nice trail to go down the other side. But, when we got to the top it looked like this:

Clearly, there was no way down. One of the most spectacular views I've ever seen (these pictures do it absolutely no justice), but no way down. Jayson decided to go a little higher to see if there was something we couldn't see. He came back down and said, "Would you like to say a prayer?" By this time I was panicing! So, we said one, and I actually felt very comforted. Jayson explored further, and sure enough, he found quite an easy path into the bowl of trees. The rest of the hike was followed by more obsticals, random landmarks to find, and no path. However, we did find some sand and there were foot prints that reassured us that we were going in the right direction. We finally reached the dried up river bed we were suppose to get to. There we saw a really cool skeleton of a deer, a snake track (not incredibly comforting, but cool nonetheless). We reached the road to our car JUST before the sun went down.

The next day we took it easy and hiked to The Emerald Pools. A pretty easy hike, but really gorgeous. They are these waterfalls and pools that have algae that turn a particularly brilliant green!

.LOVE.