Perhaps it is my romantic notions or my perfectionist tendencies, my adoration for Jason or my longing for adventure but, whatever the culprit, I do not believe in taking Valentine’s Day lightly. I insist on making the most of that lovey-dovey holiday every year with a combination of the traditional and the abnormal.
This time it was my turn to plan V-Day for Jason and me but, although that arranging took some energy, it didn’t mean I was letting myself off the hook from my regular spoiling. In addition to the large cookie bouquet I sent Jason, I had an endless barrage of homemade sugaring plotted for my fine spouse.
I made these truffles from scratch. They were uber rich and beyond sweet but quite tasty.
I began my sweet culinary rampage by making red velvet pancakes with maple buttermilk icing for our V-Day brunch. As soon as Jason had gobbled nearly a dozen of those flat treats and left to return to work, I began forming chocolate truffles. A couple of hours later I delivered those to my surprised hubby and his eager coworkers. Sugar coma accomplished: cooking completed for the day.
I forgot to bring my tripod on our snowshoeing outing but I improvised with a backpack and some cave dirt.
The following day, a Saturday, I had arranged for some aerobic togetherness with a snowshoeing outing up Big Cottonwood Canyon to Donut Falls. I am ever ready to explore the unknown and was keen to give this trail a try; I was not alone in that sentiment. We often met other groups along this path but, with lounging mountains your habitat, one need never feel cramped.
The great outdoors are no less great when they are masked with snow.
The falls themselves are located in a cave with a relatively small opening. When you crawl in you are immediately rewarded by a shimmering cascade tumbling through a circular hole in the cavern’s roof. It’s as picturesque as it sounds, plus clambering into a slot in the ground generates a few of those exploratory kicks that all adventurers seek.
Although dinner was served a little closer to midnight than I’d anticipated, it was worth the wait.
After our outdoor excursion, I concluded our celebratory festivities with a candlelight dinner of cheddar-bacon wedge salad, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, bacon-wrapped filet mignon and sticky cherry cake. Although, due to time constraints, Jason ended up assisting me some with this meal, which was not my plan, we had a great time preparing and eating together.
Valentine’s Day is not a vexation to me, as it seems to be to many. True, it involves some scheming and effort but I welcome that plotting with a mischievous mind and a willing heart. Jason is the best and dearest sort of husband; getting to pamper him on Valentine’s Day is a privilege and getting to spend time with him on that fine holiday while pursuing entertaining activities is the delicious icing on that syrupy-sweet cake. Long may the mushy sentiments and soppy customs of Valentine’s Day reign!
It has become a January tradition over the last few years for us to spend a weekend at a condo near Powder Mountain Resort and hit those slopes with a group of friends. Last year a delicious but inconvenient storm turned our chosen weekend into a slippery and wonderful frolic. This year…the less said on the subject of snow quality the better. No new snow didn’t mean a no go for us though and we had a fantastic time despite this winter’s precipitation abnormalities.
I practiced some wall hits on the slopes of Bear Hollow.
Jason and I arrived one night earlier than our buddies with the purpose of trying out a resort in the area that we had never been to: Snowbasin. Jason was like a frenzied puppy awaiting a new chew toy; he was exuberant over the prospect of boarding some unexplored terrain. His anticipation was not unwarranted. Snowbasin, as it turns out, is pretty expansive, plush and awesome. While no fresh powder transcended our experience, the sun was shining and the air was unnaturally warm. With temps in the high thirties, the snow was more forgiving than expected and we had a very pleasant afternoon.
Snowbasin is a high-class resort with eleven lifts, 2,830 skiable acres and this moose.
Snowboarders are notoriously cockeyed.
The next day, accompanied by Drew, Simone, Abigail and Adam who had all arrived the previous night, we set out on a snowshoeing adventure at Ogden Nordic, which is located at North Fork Park. (Snowboarding was ruled out as our outdoor activity of the day due to the apparent powder shortage.) No one in our group, with the exception of me and Jason, had ever tried snowshoeing before but, after some awkward acclimating, they all got the hang of it.
Winter seemed to forget its purpose and invited instead of chilled.
Although it was another uncharacteristically agreeable afternoon, half of our gang decided that they’d had enough exercise after about thirty minutes or so of trudging through the snow. Abigail, Jason and I, however, were far from ready to relinquish our sunny positions. We left the others and took a steep winding trail to a fantastic overlook. This viewpoint journey required more work than anticipated and over three miles of trekking but it was well worth it. The overlook was nestled in a nook of dense peaks and contrasting pines. It was quite lovely.
We left the overlook just after the sun descended behind the mountains but managed to cruise back to the trailhead before it got dark.
Apart from our frosty adventures, the bulk of our weekend was consumed by board games: Love Letters, Star Trek: Fleet Captains, Citadels and Poison. There was a lot of laughing, a little bickering, much strategizing and a bit of yelling involved in the playing of these games. Most of it was all in the name of fun…the rest was in the name of vengeance.
Simone and I led The Klingon Empire to a glorious victory.
What a nice weekend. Sure, the snow was less than exceptional but the sun outshone itself and the indoor diversions were, well, quite diverting.
Moab is one of my favorite places on planet Earth, well the entire Solar System really. Jason and I just made our biannual trip to its weather-sculpted plateaus and untouched deserts that feel a bit like home to us…a home with an infinite crawl space. We spent three days seeking out adventure in its unexplored routes and novel crevices. Seek and ye shall find fun, or so I hear.
The switchbacks descending into Mineral Bottom seemed never ending on the way down and a lot more never ending on the way back up.
The hype surrounding the White Rim Trail has always made Jason and me curious…and skeptical. This 100-mile-long 4WD road below the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park could possibly be the most popular scenic ride anywhere. Between the 4WDs, dirt bikes and mountain bikes, it apparently becomes a crammed freeway during peak season. Experiencing the marvels of “peaceful solitude” alongside throngs of people? No thanks. That’s why Jason and I thought we’d give this famous path a try while the nature-obsessed hordes were absent thanks to the nearness of winter. We only saw a couple of 4WDs and a handful of bikers our entire day on the rim. Hallelujah for November!
Jason took this picture of me from one switchback up. It looks like an aerial shot.
The White Rim Trail practically jumps into the Green River.
We accessed the White Rim via Mineral Bottom Road, hopping on our bikes right before this path plunges to the actual bottom of Mineral Bottom over a series of gnarly switchbacks. We sped past the remains of four or five cars that had probably dived over the side of this narrow thoroughfare many years ago. Unsettling. Once we finished our descent to the river, our journey became practically effortless. White Rim is neither technically challenging nor physically difficult, apart from the brutal climb necessary to emerge from its bottom. In fact, I would venture that it’s the easiest trail we’ve ever done in Moab.
The weather was pleasant in Moab but extra layers were necessary off and on. I got sick of pulling off and on my arm warmers so in a ridiculous halfway-state they stayed.
Was it worthy of all the hype? Not really. Towering plateaus with odd-shaped crowns encircled us and the Green River nonchalantly sprawled out at our feet surrounded by a halo of yellowing leaves but, as ideal as that setting sounds, the scenery was not any prettier than some we’ve witnessed at other less-acclaimed locations. With the seclusion we enjoyed that day, this ride was well worth it but would it be worth it in the presence of an endless caravan of tourists bent on experiencing the “wilderness”? Absolutely not. There are plenty of gorgeous places around Moab where you can enjoy nature’s exquisiteness without nature’s plague, AKA man.
This beautiful overlook on the Portal Trail marked the beginning of the ill-advised portion of the path.
Signs such as this were posted at several points on the Portal Trail.
Thanks to the time change, we only had enough daylight to bike a little over 20 miles of the White Rim but, with the 1000-foot ascent out of Mineral Bottom squished into a fraction of a mile, we got a hardy workout anyway.
Do you see a path in the middle of this cliff? No? There is one: the perilous Portal Trail.
Our second day in Moab is traditionally our hiking day. We give our sore butts a brief breather and use our feet for something besides pedaling. This time we packed our hiking day with not one but two adventures. First, we hit the infamous Portal Trail. Why is it infamous you ask? For starters, it’s one of the most dangerous trails in the world and has claimed the lives of three bikers. This route is a thousand feet up from the valley floor and right, and I mean right, on the edge of a 200-foot cliff. A three-foot ledge between the precipice above and the precipice below is all you’ve got to travel on and, believe me, it’s not much. It was scary enough just walking it, I can’t imagine the level of derangement necessary to consider biking it. The views of the Colorado River, too far below, were amazing but I found myself hugging the path while those precarious heights made me a little woozy. Beauty and terror: sounds more like your typical dating scene than a leisurely trip down a little portal.
False Kiva is tucked away in a hidden cave on the side of a rock face.
The area around Moab has so much geological diversity that the terrain looks completely different from one spot to the next.
After our 5-mile trek through the Portal of Death, Jason and I went on a different kind of adventure, the secret kind. False Kiva, so named because its origins are unknown, is a round stone structure built in a remote cave in the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park. Don’t bother looking for a trail to it on your park map, you won’t find one. While the 1.6-mile route to the kiva is pretty well-marked, the debate on whether to disclose the exact location of this archeological site has never been resolved and so it remains semi-concealed. We had a great time wandering the hush-hush path to this cave and photographing its cryptic kiva. Nothing makes something more fascinating than a secret.
These nameless precipices provided an excellent viewpoint from which to gawk at the Book Cliffs.
The ride to the Book Cliffs overlook crossed a steep tongue of slickrock.
Our last day in Moab we decided to divert from the beaten path even more than usual and take a little-known 4WD trail up to an obscure viewpoint overlooking the Book Cliffs. The Book Cliffs are the longest continuous escarpment in the world, traveling through a hundred miles of Utah and Colorado. The path we rode to “view” them was a little less than six miles total but it was so swathed in loose stones that it took us three hours to complete this outing. Although the panoramas of the Book Cliffs from the overlook were splendid, we found the unnamed precipices that the overlook itself was located on to be more interesting. We paused for an awesome snack break on their brink above Salt Valley’s beautiful desolation. What a nice, although rocky, little jaunt.
The “road” to the Book Cliffs overlook was as rocky as they come and very tricky to ride.
Moab, our favorite nature-made playground, again proved itself superior to any manufactured monkey-bars. We tired ourselves out pedaling its rimmed plateaus, discovered a few of its guarded secrets and witnessed some of its greatest dangers. It’s hard to cram that much intrigue into three days but somehow we managed.
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