I Love the Mountains, I Love the Rolling Hills...

Ahhhhhhh!!! Look at that view! We couldn't wait to go on vacation and go home to Idaho! We arrived on Wednesday, August 30th - late in the evening. Grant's a pretty good traveler usually (this was his fourth trip by airplane) and we were glad to fly straight into Idaho Falls instead of driving up from Salt Lake this trip. Thursday Jared and I got to attend the temple - something we don't get to do very often since our nearest temple is about 4 hours away in Nebraska. It was lovely. On Friday we had planned a hike. Nothing was going to stop us from getting up into the mountains this trip! We left Friday morning and drove to the trailhead at Palisades Creek. Grant had never been in the mountains before, so we took lots of pictures. The one above was taken on one of the bridges we crossed and I was so excited with how this shot turned out. We were trying to get Grant to throw some rocks in the creek. This is Grant walking around before we started our hike. He was eager to get out and explore nature!His enthusiasm was short-lived though, since he got tired just a mile or so up the trail and ended up sleeping for about 45 minutes. To make it extra exciting, we saw a Bear Warning sign posted that was from 10 days before our hike. But some horses had gone up the trail just ahead of us, and I talked A LOT just to make noise on the trail. On the way down, we ran into a bear hunter who was looking for a lost dog using some high tech tracking equipment - the dog was trained to tree bears for the hunter and he was worried because the dog had been out all night. We later saw the hunter come back down the trail with his dog.We hiked about 5 miles or so and then we decided it was time to turn around. Grandma and Grandpa Sommers were back down at the truck cooking up some foil dinners for us. So I changed Grant's diaper on my lap in the middle of the trail, then we took some pictures and turned around to head back. Grant decided he was tired of being in the carrier, and Jared was pretty sweaty from having it on too, so we took turns carrying Grant on our shoulders on the way back down the trail. This shot was too cute to pass up!! Once we got back down the trail, without seeing any bears I might add, we had our foil dinners and some other picnic essentials - oreos!! Grant had a hearty appetite and then he spent the rest of his time gathering rocks. He discovered rocks and sticks on the way up the trail and in fact even fell asleep with a rock in his hand. He lost that one, but we gave him one to hold onto on the way back down the trail and he carried it most of the way. Grant was fascinated by all the rocks to choose from. He even started piling them up together on the concrete bumper by the truck. We kept one of the rocks he collected there as a momento of his first hike. Grandpa took this picture of us before we left Palisades Creek. What a fun day!