San Rafael Swell: Day 1

Well, our original plan for our 5 days of no work was to go to Capital Reef National Park, but we kind of chickened out. Our biggest worry was for Bailey and having her sleep well. We figured we would rather go somewhere we're familiar with to lessen the stress a bit. Plus, our friends the Bergeners were going to be there with their neighbors the Grabers, so we figured we would invite ourselves and join them. We had a great time (as usual) despite us leaving a day earlier due to rain.

We got up at 4:30am on Thursday morning in order to get down to the Swell at a decent time. We were able to leave the house by 5:30am and got to the campsite around 9:30am. We ended up camping in South Temple wash, which is off the main road that runs through the Temple Mtn. Road. We quickly set up camp, made our lunches and got out there to go hike Crack Canyon. I had never done Crack Canyon, but Bill has kept telling me that Crack is an amazing canyon and he wasn't lieing. It could be one of my favorites in the swell so far.

It's fun because the drive into it was an adventure itself with a little 4x4 trail you take to the entrance (or you could hike the whole trail). The canyon has tall walls (as expected), lot's of greenery, some great narrows, an awesome "subway" of sorts, and a few drop-offs that make it challenging. I'd love to get to the end of this canyon someday. We hiked as far back as we could, until about the 4th drop-off, where we decided to not drop our kids down because it was a bit longer than the other drops.

All in all, we had a great hike. Here are some pictures from the hike below:

The opening of the canyon



Caiden and Madison climbing on the rocks



Subway looking area



Us in the subway area



The group hiking in the canyon



Greenery in the canyon



Log stuck in the canyon



Bailey getting her mineral in-take



Madison, Caiden, and Parker leading the way



Lifting and dropping kids packs down to each other



Alene waiting for us to come back up the canyon



Hiking back out





The trail going out was a little rough

Graber's truck


Jared's low-rider



When we got back we let the kids play while Jared, John, and I went shooting in North Temple wash. We set up our targets about 30' away:

John



Jared



Compilation of our shots: