29th Anniversary

Today we celebrated our 29th wedding anniversary. My goodness, that seems like a long time.

I got a really big bouquet of flowers:

Later we climbed the steep hill to our favorite picnic table in Solitude. With all of our picnic stuff in tow it takes at least 20 minutes to walk up the hill. This is our third year to come to this exact spot. It seems we are creating a tradition here. In keeping with the tradition, we decorated the table.

Our special table requires cloth napkins and a white table cloth. We bring heavy dishes. The final touch is to fill a mason jar with wild flowers. We also piled on some pine boughs and branches of quaking Aspen leaves.

After eating our picnic and taking in the view, we took our supplies back to the car. This included all of the foliage which now graces my fireplace hearth.

We went a little further up the canyon and found a place to go walking.

Here are some sights from our afternoon walk:

Happy Anniversary to us.

We have three great kids; Susan is 28 years old. She is married to a really good guy (Ben Dangerfield) and they have three kids. Emma, age 5, Becca, age 3, and Jacob, age 1 1/2.

Our son is Aaron, age 25 and our youngest daughter is Sarah, age 21.

White Pine Lake

This is the Saturday that comes just before Labor Day. Joe and I hiked to White Pine Lake. We were out on the trail for about 9 hours! We're crazy. It's probably appropriate that the first picture is of the boulder field we went through. It's just below the Lake and we spent about two hours in this stuff; one hour each way. It was hot and rugged.



This is White Pine Lake at the top of the world . It was our hard earned reward:

This guy is turning into a pretty darn good hiker:

This is just me posing for my posterity:

Flowers surviving even in the toughest terrain (Arnica?):

Click on these pictures. When they are enlarged it's easier to see what we were in:

It was a relief to get back down into the shade of the woods:

There were several little streams that spilled over the trail:

I think all of those streams merged into this roaring waterfall near the bottom of the trail:

By the time we got to our car, we were so sore and tired. We were running on will power at that point. We got home where our youngest daughter (lives at home) and son (visiting from Provo) were waiting for us. Joe was exhausted, but he drove them to In N' Out burger for big combo meals. They brought a nice big meal home to me. It was delicious.

Believe it or not, we were discussing the next hike while driving home. I told you we're crazy!