St. George: Saturday

 

Next up: Volcano.  The description was pretty exciting: “Hike among ‘lava clinkers’ as you corkscrew 500 feet to the top of an extinct volcano where you can view a volcanic crater and panoramic scenery.”  Sounds epic right?  Turns out, it kind of was, but not for the same reasons.  I didn’t get a picture of the mountain as seen from the car, but it was covered in snow. 

Now, we had seen other places “covered” in snow, but it was only on the north side of everything.  Why we didn’t apply that to this mountain, I’m not sure.  But I wasn’t leading, so we’ll blame the fact that we walked strait up the mountain while it was covered in snow on Jeff and Krista.

Josh D. found a trail near the bottom, but Jeff and Krista followed some other footsteps that went strait up, so that’s the path we took.  It was hard because none of us had shoes that did anything advantageous in the snow.  It was a pretty slippery climb.

  

   But we made it!  Here’s a view of the crater.  And a view of how there was only snow on the north side of things.

Pictures from the top.  Jeff and Josh couldn’t rest until they had sacrificed something into the volcano.  They wanted me to make it look really epic, but they were standing so far away from a gently slopping decline that it just looks okay. Haha.

Hey look!  We found the trail!  Turns out, there really was a “corkscrew trail” that went around the volcano and was not covered in snow!

Krista’s camera has a cool panoramic setting so I tried to run consistently with it.

 
 
But the real panoramic view really was worth the hike!

As we were going down the trail to the car, there was a branch in the trail.  I followed Jeff and Krista again, and was wrong, again.  Here are Noelle, Kaitlan, and Josh D. on the real trail, while our shoes were caked in mud and we trampled through sticky bushes and other such undesirable things.

After the volcano, we went to wait for the other group at the sand dunes.
 

They were pretty quick, so we weren’t there for very long, but we were there long enough for Jeff to perform a quick photoshoot for me and Kaitlan.

 

And then Jeff did some flips.

We went out to eat at a diner and then had a BONFIRE!  Most of the other group was going to camp that night.  My flash wasn’t working or I would have taken a picture of the two teensy tents that they were staying in.  One for the one boy who was camping, and one for the seven other girls.  They were crazy.

And that was the end of Day 1!  Next up: Church, Temple, Dinner, and Games Night!