Ashley National Forest

This past weekend we went camping to Ashley National Forest.  The reason for this trip was to use up the food from our 72-hour kits.  I got this idea from someone else and thought it was a great idea for rotating our 72-hour kits.  It helped me to know if we really did have enough food to sustain us for 72 hours if needed.  It was a success.

While on our trip we stop at the Flaming Gorge Dam.

 

 We crossed this bridge and the dam 5 times the whole weekend.

 

We went down to the boat launch to look at the really green river.

 On our way to Sheep Creek Loop we stopped on the side of the road to see this view.

On Sheep Creek Loop we spotted this guy.  He looked at us and we looked at him.

 We saw some beautiful colors all around us!

 While on Sheep Creek loop, we were able to take some off road trails which gave us a pretty good view of everything.

Along the way we stopped at many lakes.  We stopped at Browne lake and shot off some potatoes.  We also drove to Spirit Lake.  We had been in the car for a long time and we wanted to let the kids get out and walk for a bit.  We have found some small hikes that we wanted to go do.  The weather was making it questionable to whether we did a hike or not.  But we decided to try one.  Of course we picked the weekend of the deer hunt.  We did not want to be mistaken for an animal, so we got to wear some lovely orange.  

 We took a small hike to Jesson Lake.  It had been raining and a bit of snow while on our hike.  We figured we were only 1.5 miles away from the truck and if it started to really snow hard, we could turn around and get back to the truck before we could get stuck.  We made it to the lake and this is what we saw.  It was neat being so far away from everything and have it snow on us.  It was very quiet.  As we stayed there for a few minutes the snow really started to move in.  When the mountain was a bit harder to see we decided we'd better head out.  The snow was accumulating quickly.  We made it back to the truck but had to wipe a bit of snow off of it before being able to come down.  We were worried about the road conditions.  We were on a dirt road and would be for several miles.  Luckily, the snow pack was only on the road for about a mile before we made it far enough from the snow.  And then Bryan was having the real fun.  We were on a wet dirt road.  His mission every camping trip is to get the truck as dirty as possible.  So far our Escalante is the winner.  I don't know if he'll every be able to top that.

We kept seeing these rabbits (or maybe the same rabbit) at our campsite.  The morning we were leaving this little guy came right up to our fire pit.

 On our way home, we stopped at Red Canyon and saw some more wonderful views.