Conquering Flatiron

I have to get some new pictures up here so you aren't grossed out every time you look at my blog! So, here's some great pictures of Adam and Kevin's hike up Flatiron last week. I love the icy ones!

P.S. they came back safely!

Here they are as they started out on their hike! I'm getting cold just looking at this picture. They had a great time! More pictures to come later! :)

Adam and the Storm

Adam left tonight for a big climb tomorrow. He'll be climbing Mt. Humphreys, the tallest peak in Arizona. It's part of a group of ancient volcanic peaks that make up the San Fransisco Peaks. Humphreys is 12,000 ft tall. But that's nothin. It used to be 14,000 feet tall until it exploded in a volcanic eruption. Just like Mt. St. Helen's (she blew her top and now she's just a crater...).



So it's a pretty serious hike in the summer, but Adam and some other adventurous friends - Adam Dibble and Kevin Pike - have been wanting to hike it in the winter. Now it's getting interesting.

When Adam is excited for a trip, he packs early. As he's been gathering his materials this week, he's been asking me things like, "Aimee, have you seen my ice saw?" To which I predictably and helpfully reply, "I'm pretty sure the last time I used it was when I needed to cut that loaf of crusty bread last Saturday."

Even more interesting is that the weather is calling for a storm to come in tomorrow. Sadly, it will just miss them. But, as Adam was packing up tonight he was reviewing the weather and told me excitedly, "They're predicting 40 mile per hour winds tomorrow morning!"

I said, rather rationally, "Blech! That sounds awful! What if you're on the ridge when it's blowing 40 mph?"

And he got this look in his eyes just like Eli does right before he starts playing his DS and said, "No! That's down below! It will get up to 60 mph winds above the tree line!"

Again, me, rationally, "Won't that just blow you right off the mountain? Like if you open up your jacket, you could just become a human parachute?!"

Adam, gleefully, looking past my shoulder as he pictures an imaginary wind storm on the ridgeline of Mt. Humphreys, "It's going to be AWESOME!!"

You can see the avalanche danger and trail map HERE,
or HERE.

Nature Hike

We took the kids on a hike in South Mountain yesterday. Because it's cooled all the way down to 100 degrees. Without humidity, it's actually bearable! It's time to go outside again!

It turned out that our family hike yesterday coincided exactly with the Annual Juicy Yellow Caterpillars' Migration Across the Trail Convention. We hadn't gone 10 feet into our hike when Lizzie screamed. She'd almost stepped on a bright yellow, 4 inch larvae wriggling across her path. We studied it for a while, and then moved on, bragging to passersby that we'd found wildlife. It wasn't long till we saw another caterpillar, same color, almost as juicy. This time we looked in the brush on either side of the trail and realized that the whole mountainside was crawling with these things, and they all seemed to need to travel directly across our path to get to the southern side of the trail.

So we spent the rest of the time dodging wrigglers, counting the "spwished" ones (Ivy), and threatening whining children that complainers must slurp down the next live caterpillar we found.

Also spied on our hike: an eagle, a large lizard, an inch worm, a couple huge dragonflies, crickets and grasshoppers.

It's good to be outside again.