The Madsen's and Total Solar Eclipse

We headed down to Spring City to visit our friends the Madsen's.  The kids had so much fun catching up!  Nanette and I were able to sneak to the temple for a couple hours.  It was a short visit, but so sweet.

Riley -14, Camille - 13, Garet - 11, Preston - 11, Mason - 8, Annie - 8, Dallin - 6, Paige - 4
Wesley is 17 yrs and was off working.

Garet and Preston....they disappeared behind the Madsen's house (they live next to the mountains and have no neighbors for a mile or so) to explore.  Garet was in heaven!

Riley made the school volleyball team, so she was off practicing some of the time we were there, but they got to hang out a little bit.

Mason and Annie were so embarrassed to get their picture taken together!  Annie's baptism was the next day.

 We wanted to see the total solar eclipse so we headed to Wyoming....we camped in the forest near Lander and found a beautiful spot.  We left on Friday and the Eclipse wasn't until Monday morning.  We enjoyed being together on Saturday and then made the trek to church in Lander on Sunday morning.  We packed two solar showers and bathed in the forest!  It was quite the experience!  The kids were troopers.  Sunday night, Terra and Nate, Grandma and Grandpa, Will, Nate and Xander, and Scott came and camped with us.  We drove up to Riverton WY on Monday morning to await the famous Eclipse.  It was well worth it! We all thought it was better than we expected.

Eating our delicious corn on the cob baked over the fire!  Camille and I planned some yummy meals.  We did all of our cooking on the fire....it was really nice not to worry about packing a camp chef.

We brought along the motorcycles for fun!

This was one of the trails we hiked.

Dallin made a brick oven on the side of the fire and thought it was the coolest thing every.  We roasted apples and then rolled them in cinnamon and sugar....delicious!

The hammock was a huge hit!

More cooking for this boy

He was so black by the end.

In the forest their were all these really tall piles of rocks that we could see above the trees.  Jared convinced us to hike to the top of one.  The kids were such great hikers and we saw some cool things.

We made it to the tippy top.

A huge spider.

Forest mushrooms

The kids made a little garden out of different things.  Very clever.

We were on our way back to camp from a hike we had been on and spotted this huge bull moose just eating away in the pond.

He was so fun to watch.  He would put his entire head under the water and then come up with a mouthful of plants.

Can you spy the moose?

We hiked up to this old fire look out!  That's how they would search for forest fires in the olden days.  It was a spectacular view at that top.

These 5 crazies mean the world to me!

We went over to Rock Creek Hollow before church on Sunday and the sweet missionaries told us all about it.  We didn't realize we were so close to where we were planning to do a family pioneer trek in September. 

We also visited Sinks Canyon State park after church.  The river flows into an underground limestone cavern and then reappears a mile or so downstream on the other side of the highway (which is called the rise).

Walking into the visitors center.  Three handsome boys!

This is where the water goes under ground.

Finally Eclipse day!  

We had a great time playing and waiting!

It was fun to watch the progess over the sun.  Notice everyone's sahdows....it was only 11 am, so shadows should be pretty small, but the light is already fading.

It went so dark....the crickets were chirping and the lights in the church parking lot came on.

It only lasted for a couple minutes and then the sun started peeking out again!

The shadows from the leaves were really interesting.

This was such a fun memorable trip!  It's good to do something different once in a while!  We made the long drive home just in time for the kids to start school the next day.  Goodbye Summer!

Homer Lake Powell

I have the most generous, kind Uncle who invites the entire Grandma and Grandpa Homer family to Lake Powell for a week on his very nice houseboat.  It is a trip we look forward to all year!  We usually go the 1st week in August, so the water is so warm, usually around 80-83 degrees.  We swim and play in the water almost the entire trip.

This picture about sums up our Lake Powell trip!  So many fun adventures and memories made!  Camille was giving the air chair a try and did really well.

Grey was so happy to be out on the knee board.  He wanted to go forever!

Garet and Grey - Garet is always willing to head out with the littles so they have a buddy to help them learn.

We had a few calm days and the skiing was so perfect!  Every year I am reminded just how much I love to water ski!  It's still my very favorite.

One more just because....

The girls surfin again!  They are just so cute, I can't help but post pictures again.

One of our excursions!  Notice in the back my Mom and her two sisters - Diane and Debbie.  They are like triplets - Paige thought she was in heaven with three grandmas.   We were glad Jake, Kaylyn and Addy came too!

Cute little boys - Garet & Isaac (11 yrs) Owen & Mason (8 yrs)

Visiting with Grandpa on the houseboat.  My sweet 86 yr old grandpa has water -skiied every year at Lake Powell since we first started going.  This year he tried again, but pulled his hamstring on the first try, bless his heart!  He was such a trooper and didn't even complain and was just enjoyable as ever the rest of the trip.

Ray takes the houseboat back to the slip on Thursday, but a bunch of us stay a couple more days!  We can't get enough.  This is a picture in the slip.

This is one of Ray's boys, Blake.  He's been home from his mission for a year and is so cute with our kids.  Dallin and Paige just love him.  He's an amazing wakeboarder! 

Blake

Blake

Colton is another one of Ray's sons!  We had so much fun hanging out with him.  He is also single and is around 27 yrs old I think.  He can do any water sport to the extreme.  He was jumping so high on the air chair.

Colton

Colton

David, Becca & Mark, Michael & Kylie, Uncle Jim
Kaylyn, Addelyn, Jake, Carson, Weston, Natalee, Scarlett, Isaac, Garet, Owen, Dallin, Jared & Paige, Mason, Camille, Crystal
Natalie & Reagan, Andrew, Elle, Dale, Debbie, Lisa, Diane, Julie, Ray, Grandma, Grandpa, Blake, Colton, Kendra, Grey, Luke, Alyssa, Ryan
Carly and McCall
43 people in all!

On Wed we went on a little excursion over to the Lost Eden area.  The water was much higher this year, so there is this little slot canyon we had explored the day before that you normally can't get to because the water is too low.  It was a lot of fun, with little pools of water you had to swim through.  Mason even came with me......he was super nervous, but did really well and even jumped off the cliff edge at the very end after a lot of coaxing (it was probably 6 feet high).  I was so proud of him!  

Jared, being the explorer he is found out that this little slot canyon connects to another slot canyon that drops down into Lost Eden, so he wanted to go back and start from the Lost Eden side and then come out into the main channel where we started from.  We got a group of people who wanted to go explore (Jared, Me, Colton, Blake, Andy, Reagan) and a couple people to sit with the boat and pick us up (Carly, Dad, and Garet).  We headed out, but the clouds were moving in and I was pretty nervous because storms at Lake Powell are very unpredictable and can come on so quickly.  We decided to go anyway.  They dropped us off and we swam to the start of the slot canyon and started hiking.  We brought some 2-way radios, but didn't know if we'd be able to use them because of the tall canyon walls.  It was going well and we were hiking through small pools of water and spider-manning our way over obstacles.  At one water pool the water was so deep that we had to stack three guys on top of each other under the water and then boost Colton up, so he could help the rest of us up.  It was definitely a little scary.  The weather started to get worse and pretty soon the wind started blowing really hard.  The little bit of sand was just pounding us....then it started to sprinkle and Jared and I were getting even more nervous....flash flood danger.  We came to a pretty technical party that you had to spider man the wall pretty high in order to get through and I was holding up the group, so Jared and I decided to turn back.  The other three were going to keep going and see if they could see the other slot canyon that led down to the main channel.  We were running on pure adrenaline and trying to go fast in order to get out of the slot canyon.  We were jumping and swimming and running as fast as we could.  At one pool we both jumped in and the water was over our heads.  (We had life jackets).  We swam to the other side and the rock was smooth and rounded and we couldn't boost ourselves up to get out of the water....we couldn't touch bottom either.  We couldn't turn back because we had jumped off a 7 foot ledge and their was no other way to get out.  We both looked at each other with a look of panic.  I told Jared to just push me as hard as he could and I would try and grab the rock and scoot myself up.  It worked, we were being watched over.  I gripped the rock and slowly scrabbled up...  I was then able to lay flat and pull Jared up.  That was our last really tricky obstacle and soon we were out.  We started swimming out towards where the boat dropped us off and luckily they were there!  Pheww!  They were so worried....they said they wind was so bad that it was all they could do to keep the boat from hitting into the rock walls and it was so rough they were getting really nervous.  We had a split second of radio coverage and the other three ended up turning back too.  We made it back to the house boat, but everyone was so worried about us.  I guess some of the metal roofing that is on the slips blew off and they were listening to the Lake Powell emergency radio and hearing all sorts of scary stories and they thought for sure we were one of them.  Everyone's prayers were answered and we had angels watching over us that day.  I felt really bad that we gave everyone such a heart attack too!