Saturday, March 28, 2015

Hiking Donut Falls

     For Christmas Paul's parents gave us a really nice hiking carrier for Jace. Ever since then I have been dying to get outside and use it. I have been using it here and there when I run on the elliptical with Jace on my back, but I really wanted to do some actual hiking. Finally the weather has been consistently warm enough, and our schedules have been open enough that we decided to go hiking this past Saturday.
     Paul wanted to go in the morning before it got too crazy busy, but I convinced him that it was still spring and we needed it to be warm enough outside to take Jace out and hike. Its kind of awesome that we live literally right at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon. Our drive up the canyon was probably less than 10 minutes! We parked as close to the trailhead as we could, but the road to the actual donut falls trailhead is still closed off to cars for winter still. So we had to walk up the road a ways before we could start the hike. Halfway up we hit snow! We weren't even on the trail yet and we were walking through snow. We decided that it couldn't hurt to keep going and see how far we could get.
     We made it to the trailhead and Jace started to get fussy. I was a little bummed because we were just getting ready to start and we potentially had to turn around and head home. Luckily we had animal crackers! I just had to hand one to Jace every 3 minutes or so to keep him occupied and he was just dandy.
    Just before the falls the trail goes downhill at a pretty steep rate. With the trail being covered in snow, and having been frequently traveled, this downhill portion of the trail was basically an ice slide. Paul made it down with the baby pretty quickly. I had shoes with zero traction so I was slipping and sliding like crazy, (I was super grateful at this point that Paul was carrying the baby and not me). I found some rock and branches on the side of the trail that I basically used to boulder down the side rather than slip and slide down. We both made it to the bottom and only had a few more twistys and turnys to go before the falls.
     When we got to the actual falls, you couldn't really see them. The snow was covering a lot of the rock so it was hard to really see much of anything other than snow, and rocks. There were lots of people up there just sitting around, but with all of the snow there wasn't an easy place to sit and rest, especially with a baby. So we looked around for a few minutes, took some pictures, then headed back.
     Somehow on the way back we ended up turning and taking a different trail than the original trail that we took to get up to the falls. It still lead us where we wanted to go, it was just a lot of uphill when we were expecting it to be flat. Right near the end Jace started to get fussy again. But we made it to the car without much crying. We had a blast on our hike. Its just a teaser of what will be coming soon! Somehow I have convinced Paul to come on the annual Blatter family backpacking trip. We will be doing 6 days of backpacking to Needle Falls in Montana. I am so stoked! But we definitely need to get into hiking shape!
A fun little selfie of our cute family! I don't know how we managed to get Jace to look at the camera! 

Little Jace boy peeking over the side of his "cage"

We tried to have Paul bend over so we could get a good picture of Jace, but he didn't want to look, or smile for that matter. 


Alas! We made it to the top! As you can tell, it really doesn't look like a waterfall at the moment. 

I told Paul to try and snap a picture of me so you could actually see that I was there. 

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