This summer we’ve taken advantage of the beautiful mountain scenery so close to us here in Utah. These two hikes are some of my all-time Utah favorites.

Gobler’s Knob: 

 

Student-Adulting means that "summer break" is actually not a break so much as it as a four-month pause from school to restock the bank account.  This summer was busy -- I was working 40 hours a week and studying at night for the GRE, meanwhile Dallin was alternating between online classes, two coding internships and a restaurant job.  With UVU starting two weeks before BYU, we realized we had no time left to adventure before diving back into things.  So we took off work and headed to the mountains in our newly purchased car that my dad had so kindly driven up from Arizona.
    It was almost two hours of driving before the desert ebbed out into greenery.  We stopped to check out a historical looking building and ended up getting an in-depth tour by the senior missionaries.

 Then we located an isolated camping spot and spent the afternoon napping under a cloudless sky and even risking the icy cold for a dip in the creek.  It took me a few hours to unwind and realize that we had these few days all to ourselves, no obligations! I wrote several pages of my novel while relaxing in the ambiance of the forest.  For dinner, we set up a fire and cooked up some prepackaged food and peach cobbler in our new iron pan that we bought with wedding gift cards {along with our tent and chairs}.


     After dark, as we chatted around the fire, we heard a horrendous screeching sound close to our tent.  Uncertain of whether it was a mammal or a bird but realizing it sounded like a creature that was either very angry or otherwise getting its guts torn out, we dashed to the car and sat there with the brights on for twenty minutes before we got the courage to shuffle loudly outside with a hot marshmallow poker and move our tent.


      Another day, we accidentally encountered a munching moose from just feet away in the marshland. We also hiked the narrow trails to the wind cave trails.  My gripless Walmart shoes could have led to my demise on the slippery dirt entrance of the cave.

At the recommendation of a young family, we headed just a little farther up north and were not disappointed by the beautiful teal Bear Lake.  On every corner was a restaurant taunting burgers and "world famous raspberry shakes," which of course we had to try. We stopped alongside the road and teased each other into swimming in the frigid lake to clean off the smoke and grime, and then we sun dried on the beach like we were in California.