Pioneer Day

For those of you not from Utah, Pioneer Day - the 24th of July - celebrates the arrival of the first group of pioneers with Brigham Young into the Salt Lake Valley. Luckily, it's considered a holiday in Utah so Nate got Friday off. Despite the hot weather, we decided to venture outside for most of the day. In the morning, we went to watch the paragliders and hanggliders that fly around point of the mountain. Ever since we've lived here, Nate has seen them almost every day (except in the winter) while he drives to work and has commented several times that it would be fun to go up and watch them take off. We headed up to the flying base...or something like that. I can't remember what it's technically called. We just watched them for a while, then Nate found a guy who was training to be an instructor and he gave us the rundown on how they take off, how they control where they're flying, etc. It was really interesting to watch, and to hear and see how they can control speed, direction, height, etc. (to a certain extent). Apparently point of the mountain is a really good place to learn because of the way the winds come up over the point. In the pictures, the parachute-like ones are the paragliders, the others are the hanggliders. We were amazed that people don't run into each other, since there were so many of them out.

After watching the flying people, we went on a hike in Bell Canyon (up in Sandy). Nate was happy to just pick a random hike off a map, but I'm a little less spontaneous so I picked one

I had seen that Laura and Jonathan did a couple of months ago (I know, I'm not very original). The positives: it was short, and had a nice creek we crossed over a couple of times and a pretty reservoir at the top. The negatives: it was hot. very hot. and steep. very steep. I thought I would be nice and carry Bennett on the way up, which in some ways was a good decision because I would have been very nervous about falling on the way down if I was carrying him, but it was a fairly painful mile :) Apparently I'm in even worse shape than I thought I was. From what I'd read about the hike and seen on the blog, I thought we had gone to the top (to the reservoir, and then walked all the way around the reservoir). When we got to the bottom, we talked to some people who were starting out and they asked if we went to the top. I told them we did, and Nate said "to the reservoir?" But no, apparently that isn't the top. We missed out on a huge waterfall that's up a little further, which was kind of disappointing. The consolation was that they did say you have to climb up rocks for a ways to get there, so we probably couldn't (or wouldn't want to) do it with Bennett anyway. We at least enjoyed the part we did to.

The rest of the weekend was pretty relaxing. We went and watched fireworks that night, and we saw several different sets but we were really far away so they all looked pretty small. Nate went golfing with my brothers on Saturday morning, which made him want to expand the golfing category in our budget (or maybe create one). I stayed home pretty much all day with an annoying cold (fortunately doing much better now), but did get to go see my brother Jake and his wife Stacey and daughter Kallie, who were visiting Stacey's family for the weekend. It was really fun to see them, and Kallie even sat on my lap a couple times, to the chagrin of her grandpa (Kallie wouldn't let him hold her). I think it was only because she was intrigued by Bennett's toy that I was holding, but oh well. I let him hold Bennett for a few minutes to get his baby fix :) Thanks for letting us come see you guys!