There’s been a mix of good and bad this weekend. The kids didn’t have school on Friday, and Traci was planning on spending Friday and Saturday in Orem while she scrapbooked with her mom and sister. I took Friday off work so the kids and I could do some hiking at the Wedge. I wanted to check out another of the small unnamed canyons in that area, and we spent about three hours and hiked 2.5 miles round trip in a canyon near the end of the spur road leading west from the Wedge Overlook. The canyon was a lot like all the others in the area. We started at the head of the canyon but quickly ran into a dryfall that was too steep to downclimb. I had the kids wait near the dryfall while I hiked out of the canyon bottom and tried finding a way around it. I found a good but very steep route and returned for the kids, then we retraced my steps and followed the route down into the canyon downstream from the dryfall. After that it was pretty easy going, and we continued until the canyon ended at a 450′ cliff just above the San Rafael River in the Little Grand Canyon. The kids spent some time playing in a pool of water there while I hid a geocache, then we returned back to the truck using a different route that made the return hike a bit shorter. We found a couple of geocaches in the area before returning home, then spent the rest of the evening at home just relaxing. Here are the photos from that trip.
The next morning I was awakened by a phone call from Traci. She had spent much of the night in the emergency room at UVRMC. Earlier in the week she had a severe pain in her chest and difficulty breathing, but it went away after about 10 minutes. Saturday night at around 3:00 the pain returned but it was much worse, so her mom and sister took her to the ER where they treated her for the pain while they tried to figure out what was causing it. After several different tests and an ultrasound, they determined that she has some gallstones and that she’ll more than likely need to have her gallbladder removed. They released her from the ER at about 7:30 that morning, which is when she called me. She was feeling better, but there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t return before she could see a specialist. For now she’s on a no/low-fat diet to try and keep her gallbladder from acting up again, and tomorrow morning she’s going to call the surgeon who the ER referred her to, and we’ll know more after her appointment with him.
There wasn’t really any point in sitting around worrying about Traci since she was feeling better and was still planning on spending the rest of the day in Orem, so the kids and I went for another drive. The geocache that I placed in Bob Wright Canyon several years ago came up missing recently, so we were going to check on it and replace it if necessary. We didn’t spend a lot of time up there because we got a late start and it was already nearing lunchtime when we got to the canyon. We hiked up and found that my cache was indeed missing, which was surprising because it was a very large metal box. Instead of leaving another cache in its place, I hid one in a different spot a few hundred feet away and farther off the ATV trail. The fall colors were beautiful up there, and they’ll probably get even better in the next week or so.
I had wanted to get out again today, perhaps back to the Swell, but Traci wasn’t feeling up to it and I didn’t feel like lugging the kids around with me again, so I’m still at home in my PJs. 😀