It’s another week closer to spring, though we’re still in the throes of winter. I took my family out for another outing this weekend. We went to Buckhorn Wash first, with the intention of hiking above a dryfall in a side canyon across from the dinosaur footprint. There was still too much snow on the ground for the type of scrambling that’s needed to get up and around the dryfall, so our hike was cut a bit short. I drove farther down the canyon after that, hoping to find another place to hike where there wasn’t too much snow, but nothing looked doable. None of us had ever been up Calf Canyon before, so I drove up there to the junction with Pine Canyon. From there the road apparently gets rougher and nobody else had driven past there in the snow, so we turned around and headed back out.
Our destination after that was Cedar Mountain, where we’d planned lunch at the picnic area. The road was plowed and in pretty good shape, but a couple of times on the way up and again on the way back down the truck got sucked over into the softer snow on the shoulder and almost stuck in a snowbank. All the picnic tables and fire pits at the picnic area were covered in snow, so I first cleaned out a fire pit and got a fire going, then shoveled off a table. Traci and I prepared lunch while the kids spent the entire time sledding down a hill. We had bratwurst and hot chocolate for lunch, then Traci stayed with the kids and played while Torrey and I went off for a short hike through some deep snow into a canyon filled with huge ponderosa pines. I’d forgotten how much I like Cedar Mountain, and I’m hoping I still remember how much I like it when the weather is good enough to do more hiking there.