Mt. Timp Awesomeness!!!

I love the mountains . . . everything about the mountains . . . the green, the altitude, the sky above, yeah, it's awesome.  I'm definitely a mountain girl. 
This last weekend we hiked up Mt. Timp and it was so refreshing and awesome! Usually during this month, Mt. Timp is still covered in snow, but sadly this year, we had hardly any snow, so we were able to hike all the way to Emerald Lake with no problems at all! We wanted to go to the summit, but the whole way up the people coming down would tell us it's too risky to go all the way to the top because it's basically still a glacier and if you slid down, you would slide down about a mile into Emerald Lake before you stopped.  Yeah, no thanks.  I choose life.  (Lol name that movie). 
We had so much fun amid all the stinging nettle and of course amid the company of my studly husband Moydie and our friend Sam.  Crazily enough, there was even a Yamaha dirt bike that came down the trail and almost killed us.  Yeah, um, not safe.  Here are some pictures . . .

 Here's me in Emerald Lake

 Moydie and I on the trail :)

Sam, Moydie, and I in front of one of many waterfalls!!

And here's the favorite :)

Bountiful Baskets!!!!

When we went down to Alamosa for Father's Day, my mother told us about this great organization Bountiful Baskets!!! You pay less than 20 dollars for two baskets full of fruits and vegetables!! What?! That seems way too good to be true! But no :)  It is true as true can be.  So Moydie and I tried it this month . . .
Our total came out to $19.50 and we got . . . .

Two spaghetti squash, one cantalope, lots of plantains, lots of white nectarines . . . 

A bag of potatoes . . .

A huge thing of lettuce, celery, two tomatoes, and two onions . .  . 

And . . . 

A thing of blueberries!!! (I don't have a picture of the blueberries because they somehow disappeared after I got my hands on them :))

Cool, huh?! We thought so!! So, if you want to get this great deal you have to do three things . . . 

1. Go to bountifulbaskets.org

2.  Pay some money.

3.  Volunteer at the picking up sites every once in awhile. (There are sites all over the country!! And maybe the world . . . :))

The reason why you get all this great food for so cheap is because this whole organization is volunteer based . . .no employees!

And not to mention that fresh fruits and vegetables are super healthy for you and this way you get your healthiness for way cheaper than at the grocery store!!

Happy Father's Day Surprise!

Father's Day was coming up and I had no idea what I wanted to get my Dad.  He seriously has everything a man could want.  So I kept thinking and last Monday I got the idea, "Hey! Why don't we go see my Dad?!"  I got thinking more about it and I suddenly missed him sooo much! Yep, I wanted to see my Daddy! So I talked to Moydie and on Tuesday we finalized our decision and on Friday after work we were on our way! All the way to Alamosa . . .
I had talked to my Mom on Tuesday when we made our decision just to make sure it was ok . . . and of course it was!  It was going to be a great surprise for my Dad!
So we left Spanish Fork at 4:15pm and we arrived in Alamosa around 2:30 am lol :)
We had gotten a little bit sidetracked along the way . . . We stopped in Grand Junction for dinner at Chick-fil-A where the huge cow scared the crap outta me and then when we were about an hour and a half away, Moydie and I got way tired, so we pulled over and took a 2 hour nap lol (we were supposed to arrive around 1 to Alamosa).  Luckily, my Mom had gone to bed after making our bed (isn't she amazing?!) and we finally arrived ready crawl into it. 
The next morning, Mom woke us up for morning prayer and we hid around the corner of the hallway to surprise Dad when he walked by.  Oh my goodness! You should have seen his face! The first words out of his mouth were "What are you doing here?!" Lol it was priceless!! :) 
The rest of Saturday was spent watching my crazy sister Emily play in her summer basketball tournament.  They played at 9am, then 11am, and then in the championship game at 1pm.  Needless to say, both the teams in the championship game were exhausted.  But they played really well!! My sister is an incoming freshman in high school and she's playing Varsity :) Here's some pictures . . .

Here's my Dad taking some shots in between the games :)

Here are my lovely parents!

Here's my Dad and I :)

Here's Moydie and Little Brother aka Evan :)

And here's us ;)

Dutch Apple Pie (Gluten-Free, of course!)

On the 13th of this month, it was Moydie and my 10 month anniversary!!! Wahoo!! I don't know why I was so excited about it, but I was :) It was probably because I had a secret I was keeping from Moydie . . .

Ever since I met Moydie he would rave and talk about his favorite dessert:  Dutch Apple Pie.  One thing you have to know is that Moydie can't just snap his fingers and there it is.  Moydie is gluten-intolerant.  So . . . baked goods are hard to come by without wheat.  Anyways, ever since I met him I wanted to make him gluten-free stuff.  But I never actually did until we started dating.  I would bake him bread and cookies and even strawberry shortcake stuff.  All gluten-free.  But sadly, I never made him Dutch Apple Pie.  Whenever he would bring up how much he wanted Dutch Apple Pie, I would just feel so bad inside very well knowing that he wasn't trying to make me feel bad, but he just loves it this much.  It was especially bad at Christmas time . . .

This whole time, I'm thinking "Why don't I make him this pie?"  Well, I think part of it was because I thought it would be hard and require crazy ingredients and the other part was because I wasn't that fond of pie like he was.  I mean, I like pie, but I love brownies and chocolate more.  

So I figured 10 months of being married to this stud was way too long to keep him waiting for his most favorite dessert of all time. So, I found a recipe that didn't seem too hard and I only had to grab more apples to make it! Easy right?! I thought so!  And at the end of making the pie, I still thought that this was super easy to make!

This is the pie before the delicious crumbly stuff on top.  (It already looks so good!)

Here's with the cinnamon and sugar and crazy good crumbly stuff on top.

And here's the masterpiece!!! :)

Now I was super pumped to see his face when he came through the door after work.  And oh my goodness it was the priceless look of the century!! He smelled it before he saw it and when he saw it . . . dang it was good :) I had even made some homemade ice cream to go with it because he had told me countless times that hot Dutch Apple Pie with cold vanilla ice cream is the only way to go.  Needless to say, we had a great night! :)

Gotta love this picture! Yep, he loves me!

Dang Spiders!!!!!!!!!

My husband Moydie and I love the outdoors, but especially we love the San Rafael Swell.  There are so many cool canyons and hikes there that every weekend that we can we're there camping and exploring.  This summer has been epic so far and we've been blessed to have been able to go on so many adventures already and it's only June! 
My husband Moydie is a canyoneer.  I'm sort of a canyoneer.
This past weekend we went out to the Swell to beast the North Fork of Iron Wash Canyon.  Moydie researched this canyon for like two weeks straight so we knew exactly what to expect, more or less.  We were plenty prepared and we felt really good.
The hike to the entry part of the canyon was long, but very scenic as one of the landmarks was an old oil rig.

So after having fun with the old oil rig, we finally made our way to the canyon entry point.  We climbed down very skillfully and we were in a super cool canyon.  We were having a great time and nothing was very technical yet.  Until we found a medium sized pot hole which could easily be climbed down and up out of.  It was a little slow going on my part, but we made it down and I felt very accomplished.  Then we reached a dark, tiny, slanted, slot canyon . . .

 

 

 This dark, tiny, slanted, slot canyon was a little awkward to go through because you know, you're shimmying slanted lol.  Moydie's shoulders barely fit in between the canyon walls.  So it was tight.  I had previously learned I was slightly claustrophobic when we first got married and tried to share a one man tent with Moydie.  Bad idea.  So since I have this slight claustrophobia, I was trying to stay as calm as I could through this dark, tiny, slanted, slot canyon.  I was doing just fine, coming right behind Moydie when all of a sudden I looked ahead and I started to wonder how far this went.  So I stopped and I asked Moydie how far this goes like this and he thought it could go for as far as 700 meters!!! What?! I was little scared of that, but I just paused for a breath and I told myself it would be fine, when all of a sudden I saw a huge daddy long leg.  It didn't scare me at first because I knew they were harmless, but I was already a little creeped out by the dark, tiny, slanted, slot canyon so I yelled for Moydie to come get it.  Moydie shimmys his way back to me and looks at it when all of a sudden I see three, four, five more come out of an overhanging in the rock above us.  I took a sharp intake of breath and frantically started backing up out of the dark, tiny, slanted, slot canyon.  I went a ways, then paused as I looked at Moydie to take a deep breath and relax, when all of a sudden he looks at the spiders and looks back at me panicked.  This time we booked our way out of the dark, tiny, slanted, slot canyon.  

Hey, this is Moydie.  I'm stepping in here for a minute, because Lindsey didn't see what I saw, and I wanted to tell it myself.  As Linds said before, we had entered a narrow, dark, slanted slot.  The going was slow and tiring, since you had to lay on the left wall and scoot yourself along by pushing against the opposite wall (or ceiling, depending upon how you look at it).  Like I said, it was dark.  But there was enough light to see the gorgeous sculpted walls you can only find in a sandstone slot canyon.  We had already passed a few technical obstacles with no trouble, and I was in high spirits.  That being said, there's always a slight uneasiness the first time in a new technical canyon.  You're buried deep in the bowels of the earth with no way out but ahead.  Technical canyons can rarely be reversed without leaving fixed ropes behind you.  Even if you're confident that you can make it through, it's still sobering knowing that your choices are either to complete the canyon descent, or quite possibly die there.  When Lindsey asked me how long the slot was, I could hear the worry in her voice.  I started moving back to her when she pointed out the spiders.  At first, I just told her it was a harmless Daddy Long-legs and moved on.  Then I saw...IT.  It was a patch of spiders about the area of a doormat.  I don't mean there were "many" spiders, or even "lots and lots" of spiders.  There was a thick shag-carpet of spiders.  There were spiders crawling over spiders.  There were spiders two or three inches deep, all sitting in a huge mass under a tiny ledge.  I'm no more squeamish about spiders than most guys.  Maybe less so, in fact.  I know Daddy Long-legs' are harmless things, and I could probably handle a dozen of them crawling on me without feeling much unease.  But this was beyond me.  You only see things like this in nightmares and horror movies.  I never would have believed it was real if I hadn't seen it.  And just a moment before, I had crawled within inches of it without even knowing. 

CREEPY!!! AND FREAKIN' SCARY, RIGHT?! 

So that was what he saw before he looked back at me with a panicked look on his face.  I felt like we were in a horror movie . . . seriously.  I'm very lucky I didn't have nightmares last night, but I think I was just way too exhausted.  When we had gotten out of the dark, tiny, slanted, slot canyon we felt a lot more at ease and he told me that there were more spiders than I was probably thinking.  So I was just thinking about 50 or so spiders in a clump.  When we got out of the whole canyon and were lounging in the shade of a cliff eating lunch, he finally told me the truth that there were not hundreds, but probably thousands of those daddy long legs.  Shiver, shiver! Oh my gosh!! Even now when I think of that, I totally get creeped out and I just think how thankful I am for us being safe from feeling those tens of thousands of legs all over our bodies . . .

Memorial Day 2012

For Memorial Day this year, we went up to Moydie's family's cabin!! It was gorgeous weather and we had a lot of fun chatting, taking rides on the four wheeler, knocking down dead trees . . . oh yes, we even found a poor chipmunk plastered to the wall of a shed dead because his head got stuck in between the logs!! Can you believe that?! I absolutely screamed when I saw that! Anyways, the big event of the day was the bonfire . . .

 

Yeah . . . this is a picture of a few minutes after it starting going . . . 

This is a picture of Moydie getting ready to light it . . . Moydie's mom was very nervous about this since there was a slight wind and the fire danger was HIGH that day.  After she voiced her opinion, I started to get a bit nervous . . . then after it started, everyone got nervous as bits of old prescriptions caught on fire and then blew with the wind.  

Here's Moydie way up on the hill watching to make sure no burning prescriptions start burning the forest.  I believe he only had to stomp out one and the forest is still safe and green to this day!

Here's us after the crazy bonfire died down to a big pile of ash.  We look happy and relieved, wouldn't ya say? :)