End of School... Time for Summer!

Paul was lucky to finish his spring semester the first-ish week of May. My summer break didn't start until the third week of May. I wasn't too upset that Paul's summer started before mine because he gets to work all summer. I get the summer off. :)

A little bit before school ended Paul received an invitation to join the prestigious Beta Gamma Sigma, which is a club that only the top 10% of the business students receive an offer for,  and it is nationally known. Because this is such "big" thing, he had to be inducted into the group. We got to dress up real pretty and go to a ballroom for a fancy catered meal. The food was not so great, but it sure looked nice. Paul was inducted and we both decided that one day when Paul is rich and famous, even though the food isn't always great, dressing up and going to fancy ballrooms would be kind of fun.

For memorial day weekend my cousin Krista Sohn and her husband Craig came down to visit us. We had lots of fun plans to go hiking, and cliff diving and just enjoy the awesomeness of Southern Utah. But to our dismay Krista and Craig brought bad weather with them. The weather was great all week until they showed up on Friday night. It started to get chilly and windy, and Saturday morning at frisbee it was on and off hailing and snowing and raining. We decided that it would be to cold to do anything in Cedar City. We had to hope that in St. George the weather would be a little bit nicer. Paul and I decided to take Krista and Craig to Snow Canyon. There are lots of fun hikes there, some caves, and the weather is usually about 10 degrees + warmer. The first hike we did was to the Lava caves. We were so smart and only brought one flashlight so traveling through the caves was not the easiest thing we did that day. There were a few old glow sticks still giving off light in the deepest cave. It was kind of cool to turn off our one light and see the faint glow of the glow sticks all round us. It kind of made me realize how small we really are and how big the whole wide universe is.


After hiking through the caves we did a hike to called the rock amphitheater. It takes you up to natural amphitheater made in the rocks. There is also a little cove filled with whiter than white, finer than fine sand. We didn't really do a whole ton at the actual amphitheater, but we played in the "celestial sands" for a good half hour, took lots of crazy fun pictures, then decided we were all really hungry so we headed back to Cedar to eat at the famous Pastry Pub. We also spent part of our Saturday doing almost nothing, which is not a common occurrence at the Burnett home.

Krista and Craig left on Sunday evening, but Monday is a whole other story. Paul's old roommate Joe Keeler and his wife Tricia wanted to do a 12 mile hike through a slot canyon up Cedar Canyon that ended in Cedar Breaks National Park. I have been to Cedar Breaks and it is gorgeous, so we consented to going on this hike. About 8 months ago there was a massive landslide up Cedar Canyon that took out about a mile stretch of road and turned rivers into ponds and did all sorts of crazy madness. And it just so happened that this landslide took out our hiking trail too. We didn't figure that out until we were 4 hours into our hike and lost, of course, but hey, finding out sooner rather than never was a good thing. After bush whacking, getting cuts, scrapes and bruises, and moving no more than a few hundred yards in an hours time, we started to get smart and actually look at where we were and what we were trying to hike into. The girls sent the boys to scout out the area and see if what we were trying to do was even passable or not. An hour later they came back with news of no trail but they found a cool pond type thing. We decided to follow them out to what they had found.

When we got to the pond we didn't really see a trail, but we saw what looked like a cool nook in the rocks to explore. After having lunch we set out to see what this "nook" really entailed. As we got closer we realized that it was actually the start of the slot canyon. We had wandered around for almost 5 hours before we saw the start of where we wanted to be 4 hours ago. We started hiking though the canyon taking lots of care not to get our shoes wet. Within the next hour Tricia, Joe, and a friend of theirs, Alicia,  decided dry shoes wasn't worth the trouble. I quickly gave in as well. Paul still tried very hard to keep his shoes dry.

Now I forgot to mention that Paul and I had to be back at a certain time because we were hosting a BBQ so the further we got into the canyon, the more we realized that if we weren't careful we would be too far out of reach to get back in time. Because we had taken so long to find the actual trail, we didn't know how much of our six miles in we had covered. All of us wanted to get to Cedar Breaks, but  no one knew how close we really were. After Paul and Joe saying, "I bet it is just around that bend," ten or more times, we decided that we could only go on for another hour and if we didn't find it we would turn back. We sent the boys running ahead to determine if it was worth it to keep moving forward. Near the hour mark the boys came back with grim expressions. They said that they didn't find it and they had no idea how much farther ahead it was. We all sadly turned around and headed back. We had about 3 hours to cover the ground it took us 6 hours to do previously. Thankfully Paul decided that dry feet weren't all they were cracked up to be, so we saved lots of time because he could now just walk through the river and not worry about finding stepping stones.

Two and a half hours later we get back to our car. Some how we got out of there way faster than we got in. But no one was complaining. We drove down the canyon and got home perfectly in time to put the meat on the grill for our BBQ that night.  It was a very long and crazy day, but we had so much fun. Joe and Tricia said they google mapped our route when we got home to see how close to Cedar Breaks we really were. They told us that we were still 4 miles away! that means of our hike that we had planned about 6 miles in 6 miles out we were only 2 miles into the canyon! We felt so silly for thinking that we were so close to our end goal when really we were not even half way there. We decided that some day when we have nothing to do, and need to fill up a day this summer, we are going to start this hike and actually finish at Cedar Breaks.