The Tangrens

Youth Conference was up at Moosehorn Lake this year which is in the High Uintas. I'm sad to say that I wasn't excited to go. But when we got up there it was amazing. We set up camp in the four campsites we'd reserved. One of them (where we stayed) was pretty far away from the other three but it was worth the walk to have the view.


This was practically the view from our tent door. I just couldn't get enough of it. I kept taking pictures. After an amazing dutch oven dinner ( thank you Mama chef and Billy Goat ) we headed out on a night hike to Fehr lake for a discussion and star gazing.
It was a full moon that night so the star gazing wasn't as good as it could have been but we did see one shooting star. It was super cold and the warm cobbler was so good as a goodnight treat. No one slept good that night because it was really cold and the ground was hard, but we woke up to this...
Is there anything better than hot cocoa and a crackling fire on a cold morning while camping? I of course woke up earlier than I usually do and was greeted with this amazing scene...
Beautiful...absolutely beautiful! I guess it's my turn to make western transplants homesick.

Later that morning we climbed Bald mountain. It was only a two mile hike but we climbed 2,000 feet up rocks. Someone called it a big rock pile and after climbing it; that is a perfect description.
This is a picture of Bald Mountain from our campsite. Looking at this picture I still can't believe I climbed it!! It was kind of a scary hike at times. If you had a misstep you could be in some serious trouble. I don't have any pictures of the scarier parts it was at those times that I was concentrating on my footing and not my camera but this kinda gives you an idea of how it was.

But we made it to the top and it was an incredible view. While we sat and ate our lunches we heard the sound of approaching planes. As they got closer we discovered that they were fighter jets from Hill Air Force Base and they were only a few hundred feet above us!


It's really blurry because my camera focused on the hat instead of the planes but you can get an idea of how close they were to us.

Something I was continually thinking about while I was there was the incredible scope of the human eye. I would see these amazing scenes and would go to take a picture and it would not do it justice. The subjects were too far away and when you zoomed in you lost most of the scene you were trying to capture. Or the camera would flash and illuminate the things right in front of it and miss the scene behind that you were trying to capture. Then when you turned off the flash it was too dark. There is just simply no way to capture what the human eye can see. Some things just need to be experienced. Or maybe I'm just a horrible photographer.

Regardless I had to get a picture of myself at the top....even if I had to do it myself.
I totally got sunburned. But you don't think about sunscreen when you are cold. Of course at 12,000 feet you really should.

Something I loved about our hike was the darling little wild flowers that lined the trail. Wild flowers don't really bloom very long if at all in the valleys in Utah...it's just too dry but they do in the mountains. Since it is so consistently cold on this particular mountain they were short and stubby but no less stunning.

What was even more fascinating was that they seemed to grow directly out of the rock.

After the climb we did a few activities and had some free time and then packed up to go home. It was a short trip but I missed Derek and Hyrum a lot and was glad to go home, despite the beauty. We'll just have to go back together sometime.