The Reynolds Turkeys!: Slot Hike Heaven

The week after July 4th, family started to filter back out of Cedar Crest and to their respective homes. We then took advantage of an opportunity to go find adventure with our little family. We packed up Mom and Dad's pop-up trailer and headed down to the Escalante Grand Staircase in the Utah Canyonlands. While we have visited many interesting places in this world, we all agreed that this was one of our favorite trips EVER!

The Petrified Forest

Peek-a-Boo Canyon

Heading down

Jake, fascinated by the idea of caryns showing the way

Dad & Josie find shade

Entering the "Peek-a-Boo" slot hike

Super cool rock formations!

Mia & Jake

Kids slip-sliding all over the place

Beautiful boy!

Peek-a-boo!

Peeking through Dad

Peek-a-Boo Canyon emptied out, and then led us down into Spooky Canyon

Spooky!

Ry & Jake

The girls

The boys

Looking down

Coming down

Narrow Passages

REALLY narrow!

Squeezing Through

Kids

Battle Scars

Beautiful Canyon Walls

Kids & I

Heavy!

Feeling pretty bad: Hike complete!

From here we drove back towards Escalante and stopped in Devils Garden, not necessarily a hike per se, but a fun plot of "toadstools" where the kids had fun running and jumping all over cool rock formations:

Ry & Josie discover the toadstools

Mia

Rock Cove

Rock hopping

Thys

Mia jumps!

All jump!

All together

Traveling from Devils Garden back into Escalante, we realized we still had about 5 hours left of daylight. Since we hadn't already packed enough fun into our day, we decided to find the Escalante River and any existing hike closeby (to cool off a bit). Ryan asked the advice of some rangers and our last hike of the day, Upper Calf Creek Falls, took some finding... but was well worth it!

Hiking upstream

in the slippery muck

might deter some folk.

But not our crew!

Jake seemed to enjoy

becoming one with the slimy creekbed.

We ditched our shoes

& continued upstream.

We neared the falls

& welcomed a cooling off.

Upper Calf Creek Falls

Dirty

Feet

Tasty feet/Stinky feet

I think most people would head home at this point; I know I was ready to...we had already squeezed a lot of hiking into a day. But Ryan heard from the ranger that just beyond Upper Calf Creek Falls there were some swimming holes, but you had to weather some unmarked trails to find them. Talk about motivation! All Ryan had to hear was "unmarked trails" and he was bound and determined to find the swimming holes. And find them we did, just above the falls and a cascading river of death that I was sure the kids would fall into! But, oh! We had such fun! Everyone stripped down to their chonies and enjoyed the cool swimming holes and rock jumping without worry that anyone would see.