Over the River and Through the Woods

Took a nice long Jeep ride today, hiked around a little bit and found a few geocaches. I was pretty set against bringing old McD's toys to trade, but every cache we found had a bunch of old McD's toys in it. :) I guess it's just for fun anyways. :) I took so many pictures of the blooming desert that by the time we got up into the mountains where the trip got really interesting, my card was full. I'll tell that story at the end. BTW...to expand any of these pictures, you just need to click on them.
A cactus that I thought was pretty......
This little tree was in a hidden alcove that was about a 45 minute hike to find. It reminded me of the kind of place Moses might have found the burning bush.
As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the sage is all in bloom right now in the desert. :) There are more kinds of sage than I realized with all different colors of flowers. The desert is such a beautiful place!!
Here's an interesting one.....it's called 'Brigham Tea' by the locals. It's real name is Ephedra. I've never seen flowers on it until I walked by this plant today.
This one looked like a giant snowball until I got close enough to see the individual tiny flowers. WOW!
Emma's favorite....the cactus. Obaachan gave me a cactus a year or two ago and Emma grabbed hold of it. She won't soon forget the lesson she learned. :) These cacti are everywhere- and have flowers of yellow, pink and deep red. We peeked into one of the flowers and saw some bees hiding inside. (It was a little bit cold today) We noticed bees taking shelter in all of the cactus flowers. I wish I could have gotten a picture of that.
Just another pretty purple sage flower.
The rocks we hiked toward.
I just thought this was pretty to see the contrast of the dark and light green sage.
Ah, my favorite, the Chaparral bush. :) When it rains in the desert, you can smell these pretty bushes.
Another variety of purple sage.
A pretty little purple flower. :)

My bad...I haven't cleared my camera since Johnny's wedding, so my card got full today before the adventure was done. After the hike, we went up the mountain to look for just one more geocache. It got a lot colder and we actually ran into some snow. The last geocache was a short walk down a cow path. Emma added "COW PIE" to her vocabulary. Specifically...."Don't step in the COW PIE!" Emma recognized the black rock as lava rock and announced that we were on a volcano. I asked her what volcanos do. She said they Interrupt. :) A little further up the mountain the road had been plowed for only one car to fit through....the walls of snow on either side of us where 4 feet high or more. Then came the mud. :) DJ insisted on washing the Jeep yesterday. So much for that. :) Near the top of the mountain we ran into a minivan that was stuck up to its running boards in the mud. I don't even know how they made it as far as they did- but they were stuck good. :) I asked if they wanted a push out. We ended up pushing them up the mountain about a quarter mile until they could at least turn around. After they were out, I was glad we didn't have any license plates on our vehicle. I didn't see any damage to their minivan....but you just never know these days with everyone being sue happy. :) When we pulled back into town, DJ wanted to wash the Jeep again. What the hell? Is he going to wash it every time it goes off road? Isn't it kind-of fun to have a dirty Jeep to remind you of the good times? :)