Bonnie, Stacey and I decided to run over to Stephanie's house to wish her a happy birthday.  Can I just say how much I love these ladies!  Bonnie made her a birthday card that was absolutely hilarious!  She has got to be one of the funniest people I know. 

This morning I went on a hike with Bonnie up to Ferguson Canyon.  We have been trying to think of a place to take the young women and young men for a hike for our combined activity next week.  Bonnie is an avid hiker so she knows  a lot of places to go, but we needed it to be do-able by everyone. She had seen this hike on the Internet and it sounded really good (only 3 1/2 miles round trip) but we thought we had better check it out before we took all the kids up there.

It was kind of strange, you got to the trail head from a residential neighborhood...then walked down a dirt road for a ways, then it headed right up the mountain.  It started out to be a real nice hike.  Easy and real pretty scenery.  The trail followed along a little stream so there were places where we had to cross the water (still not too hard) and beautiful waterfalls to see along the way.

 This was just at the start of the hike...such a pretty view looking out over the valley up there.

 Then it started getting hard.  This was pretty steep and the dirt and gravel made it pretty slippery

 We got a little off the main trail about half the way up there (fork in the road!)  So when we were looking for the markers it was talking about in the hike description Bonnie had printed off, we were not seeing any of them!  We kept going though and it continued to get more and more difficult.  We decided at this point, that this hike would not work out for the kids.

 When we got to the top of the mountain, we sat  down to rest for a bit.  A guy came by and we asked him if this was the way to the top.  He said no, that the trail that we should have been on was on the other side of the mountain.  At the fork in the trail, we had taken the wrong path.  Oh well, we  were fine with that.  Then on the way down, we got off the path again and were on some animal trail!  It was really thick with bushes and little trees, but we didn't know what else to do so we just kept going down.  We both fell a bunch of times and I walked right into a low branch of a tree.  Ha!  That's going to leave a mark!  We finally found our way back to the main path and made it down the rest of the way.  Coming down was much harder than going up.  The slippery sandy parts were really bad coming down.  We had to just sit on our bottoms ( after falling) and slide.  It was a lot of fun though.  I wouldn't mind trying it again and trying to stay on the right trail.  It was so beautiful up there.  We are so lucky to have these amazing mountains so close to us.  I want to hike a lot more this summer!