Grand Gulch Day 3

Wednesday morning was cold!  But we managed to get ourselves packed up and back out on the trail.  Our first destination was filtering more water - which was found up Todie Canyon.  It was a good break for our kids, too - it took us about 45 minutes to find the water and then fill all the water bottles and water bladders that we had!

 Jonas bought me five pounds of taffy for my birthday.  5!  (Our local - 4 blocks away - hardware store sells some really yummy taffy!)  Miles agreed to carry it and handed it out at various times along the trail.  Here he is getting ready to dole out the taffy.

 Hand-print pictographs were at just about every site!  Cute.

 Some animal pictographs - the one of the right depicts (supposedly) a mountain goat with a spear in it.  Nice.

 Another cool ruin.  I think this site was called Turkeypen Ruin.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the cool "turkey pen."

 Miles was our reader - he read the information pamphlets at each site.  Not the whole pamphlet, but at least a few pages (and more than the rest of us!).  He then shared his knowledge with us.  He worked out great.  :)

 A cool kiva at Turkeypen - no, I think this was Junction Ruin.

 More cool hand-prints.

 This must have been part of Junction Ruin - our final destination for Day 3.  It was a big site - with even more ruins high above that were not accessible!  So cool.

We finished up hiking quite early this day - by 3 pm (usually we hiked until 5 or 6).  We had done another 6 miles. The kids had a lot of time to run and explore near our campsite - and get banned from certain places they were exploring (too scary for their parents!).  The boys found lots of ancient petroglyphs and pictographs:

 Some type of animal perhaps?

 Very cool.  I think this was Ben's favorite Indian art.  We walked along this wall and just saw all sorts of stuff.  Awesome.

 The boys chilling in their hammocks.  They slept out that night and weren't too cold (even though Ben and I were!).

 Lucy's brown bum . . . from silly putty + dirt.  :)

Oh how they love each other!

Lucy slept-talked on this night (which she has done previously before while camping - she'll talk, but she's not fully aware).  She was crying (Ben and I were in a different tent) and we tried to figure out what was wrong . . . but she didn't know/couldn't tell us.  Finally Ben asked, "Are you okay?"  She said, "yes," and so we all went back to bed.  Lucy had no recollection of it in the morning.  :)