Emerald Lake

 Rockwell and I hiked to Emerald Lake with Grandma & Grandpa Ham on Wednesday. Mel and Ataiya were planning on hiking too, but Mel dislocated her shoulder last week. We definitely missed them and were bummed they couldn't be there with us! We got to the Timpooneke Trailhead just before the sun started to rise and hit the trail as soon as it was light enough to see where we were going. We got to see a mama moose and her baby, which we all loved!

There were beautiful wildflowers a lot of the way.

I've never seen these flowers before. They look like Dr Seuss flowers that belong in WhoVille. :)

It was fun to visit while we hiked and enjoy all the different views and beauty all around us.

We were all excited to show Rockwell the toilet. :) It's so unnerving to use the toilet out in the middle of all that open space! He thought it was hilarious...and disgusting. It truly was disgusting and I was so grateful that I didn't need to use it. Grandpa really wanted a picture of him on it, but he took one look at it and decided a humorous picture wasn't worth it!

All the other times we've hiked the Timpooneke trail, we've gone through the meadow and up to the saddle or the top of Mount Timpanogos. We decided that we wanted to go to Emerald Lake this time, so we crossed over and went up a new trail to get to the lake.

In the picture above, you can see the gigantic hill of rocks that we climbed up and over to get to the other side. I much prefer a nice dirt trail, but Rockwell liked hiking on the rocks.

The lake was just on the other side of the rock rim, and it was beautiful!!

I love the colors of the water.

There were about 25 mountain goats around the lake and up on the glacier. Rockwell had a lot of fun throwing rocks in the lake. We headed back down after enjoying the view and eating some lunch. As we were climbing back down the rocks we started to hear thunder in the distance. I really thought we would get back to the car before any rain started to fall, but the thunderstorm hit when we had 3 miles left to go. We kept hiking through it just wanting to get to the bottom and be finished and out of the rain sooner. But then it started really coming down and filling up the trail pretty quickly. We decided to find a tree to cover us and wait out the storm. The raindrops were huge and cold, and eventually turned into hail. Grandpa brought two parkas, so Grandma and Rockwell were able to put those on and that helped. We were all covered in mud and soaked to the bone though, which really put a damper on the hike. As we were waiting under the tree, we all agreed we didn't want to hike again for quite a while.

This hike was 13 miles total, making for Rockwell's longest hike yet. The rain made for quite the adventure, but the first 10 miles of the hike were just awesome. I'm so proud of Rockwell for how well he did, and I loved spending that time with him and seeing him get that time with his grandparents. Way to go Rockwell!!