What a Beautiful Day for a Hike...

In the short time we've lived in Utah, the kids and I have done numerous hikes, but sadly they have all been without Daddy.  Well, Saturday may have been one of our last beautiful days for a while so to take advantage of it, we decided to go on a hike.  We are fortunate that in the town where we live, they have countless hiking, mt. biking, and horseback riding trails along the foothills.  We packed up our gear and headed out to the trail head.

We hiked up to the "bench" along the Wasatch Mts. in our town...the "bench" is a straight line going horizontal along the mts. that you can see from the valley...it's where the water use to be many, many, many years ago when the valley was a large body of water.  From there we ended up on the Bonneville Shoreline trail which climbed even higher.  Along the way, we passed other hikers and mt. bikers.  We discovered that the dirt road that leaves from the trailhead goes to another trailhead, so when we got back to the car, we decided to see just how far the dirt road went...boy are we glad that we did.  It took us all the way back to corner canyon...What a gorgeous view from back there.  There was yet another trailhead back there as well.  I can't believe I didn't realize we had such beauty here in our own town...no need to drive anywhere else to hike!  (But we know we will still drive LOTS of places to hike because there are too many too choose from!)

This is a view from the bench to part of our town below

This is looking up from the bench

Once we hiked up to the bench, it was easy sailing, but the climb up from the trailhead was a killer with all the extra weight on my back!  It helped me to work off the Philly cheesesteak I had for lunch at Moochies with Kevin and Cara!

At the trailhead, there were some rocks for the kids to climb on...it should NOT surprise you that my daring daughter climbed to the top of this by herself.  (It was a good 3+ feet high)

Riley climbed to the top of this one with a little help from dear old Dad...He was pretty nervous at first, but once he learned how to navigate the rock wall, we couldn't get him down!

This is the view from Corner Canyon at about 4:30pm.  Isn't it beautiful?  Hard to capture the colors while looking west (and from my iphone), but you get the point.  Looking this way (east) from the west, you don't realize how far back this canyon goes.  There are so many trails to explore from this point that I can't wait for our next nice weekend!  Hopefully we'll have a few more before next spring!