Picacho Peak

This mountain is pretty gnarly lookin' huh? We drive past this peak every time we go to or from Mesa so I guess we've seen it like 200 times now and always thought, "It would be cool to hike that someday." Lucky for us we have some awesome friends who were inspired by our Grand Canyon story and talking about fun hikes turned into actually planning one for the next Saturday, no time to loose!

It is a crazy trail!
The cool think about this mountain is that the trail actually goes to the tippy top. Since there isn't any place to put a normal trail they just put cables all over the place and you go straight up. We loved it...no boring switch backs here!

The view from the top is really cool. Picacho just sticks up in the middle of a huge flat area between mountains so it is amazing how far you can see!

Thanks to Cristy and Joel for making us do it. It was quite a big deal for us to get our first paid babysitter for our kids! We actually trusted a teenage boy with our children for 5 hours! I was so scared. It all worked out and we had a great time.

The bad thing is that doing all this fun stuff only makes us want to do more fun stuff. Anyone for the Superstition Mtns next weekend? ha ha

The Grand Canyon!

I never really thought I would do it but I hiked the Grand Canyon!The hike we did was down a steep trail, along a plateau for about 6 miles and then up another crazy steep trail for a total of about 14 miles. It was amazing! Here we are at the top with Lindsay Melen, thanks for inviting us to come!
And one on the way out. The funny part is that when we were scouting out the hike the night before we saw some people coming up the trail and they went through a tunnel at the very top. So, the next day after we had been hiking straight up for 3 hours we came upon this tunnel, halileuja! We made it!...or so we thought. It turns out there are 2 tunnels, the tunnel at the top was another 45 minues up, sad! The stats:
15 degrees when we started
3500ft elevation loss/gain
1 MRE (per person)
64 oz of Gatorade
4 potty stops (those are a big deal in the wild)
14 miles
8 hours total hiking time

Now that is a serious hike in my book!
I love Quinn for doing this with me and sticking with me the whole way. We were glad we had him along other wise we would have missed most of the scenery due converstion, thanks Quinn!

Halloween!

We loved carving pumpkins...
I am now a fan of the small pumpkin, so much easier to carve than the huge ones!

We sat out in the back yard watching them glow for an hour. Quinn and I sat and the boys were dancing around them, staring them in the eyes and were generally mesmerized by them.

Grandma and Grandpa were happy to have Buzz and Woody over for Halloween.



"You have candy for me in there, i see it!"

All the sugar really helped Buzz to take off!