Mountains All Around Us That We Can't Seem to Climb

When I was about Alden's age, we lived in a very small, coal-fire heated home, high in the foothills of the mountains known as the Wasatch Front. Our home could only be reached by dirt road--no small task in the snows that descend in winter.  A creek ran nearby, and my summer days were filled meandering up and down the trails that ran along side it.

My one-time home is now surrounded by an avalanche of foothills developments, but the mountains and streams remain.  I love them.  From those early mountain wanders comes the part of me that wants to go just a little bit further, up one more hill, or around one last bend, just to see what is there; the part that actually sees the beauty surrounding us every day; the part that steps out of the routine, and explores new things.  More deeply, the wonders I found, flowers and fishes, trees and colors, animals and warm sun, first gave me the conviction that there must be a God, who took chaos and survival of the fittest and turned it into all of these beautiful, ordered, miraculous things.

When we moved back here from San Francisco 3 years ago, I was excited in part because I wanted so badly to share those early experiences with my children.  But something always seems to get in the way. Soccer, shopping, primary programs, garden, yard work, aging knees, too-small shoes, or any of a hundred other things -- most needed, some even important -- all  seem to keep me from really sharing with my kids one of the most formative parts of my youth. 

I also worry that my experience may just be totally irrelevant for them -- they don't have that much desire to be outside half the time, and hot, sunny summer days are made for computers in air conditioned homes, not traipsing through cool mountain streams for hours on end.  

Yet I persist in believing that one afternoon building a dam together on a mountain stream would be worth two years of soccer games.  So we continue to try, and even managed to hike a few times this summer -- Milcreek Canyon, Holbrook Canyon, Tony Grove Lake, and as always, Soapstone Basin for the wildflowers.

I don't know if it will ever be the same for them as it was for me, with a creek two-minutes-walk away and nothing else to do.  But I hope these small efforts some how help them find the things I did in the cradle of a mountain home.

 If nothing else, it has given Keegan the opportunity to play "I am King of The World -- In my Underwear!"  Now where else can you have a fine experience like that?  (Don't ask -- lets just say it comes under the ubiquitous category of "lessons in potty--training".)

  

By the way, if you haven't been to Franklin Basin or Tony Grove Lake at the height of wildflower season, you are missing a real treat.  The pictures do not do it justice. But if you are lucky enough to go, you may just catch a badger playing around the beaver dams in Logan Canyon on your drive home, and that alone should make it a great trip!

Here is hoping that next summer will bring more hiking, and less to-doing.