Summer vacation 2012–Salt Lake City, Utah

We  made it to Salt Lake City and decided to visit Timpanogos cave while we are here.  I am so glad we did because it was INCREDIBLE!  The hike was long but beautiful.  Here are some pictures of the beautiful scenery along the way.

 

The kids did really well on the hike for the most part.  There were a couple sections along the trail where there was a very steep drop-off with no fence on the right hand side, so that made me extremely nervous!  Then Kyrie started spazzing out because she thought she saw a bee and went WAY too close to the edge, which very nearly gave me a heart attack!  We had a nice, long talk about how they had to be extra careful and safe (and how dying is far worse than enduring a possible bee sting!!!), and thankfully we had no further scares. 

It took us a couple hours to get up to the top - it’s 1.5 miles long and gains nearly 1,100 feet in elevation along the way.  We had to make quite a few stops to let the kids (and ourselves!) rest a bit, but we made it just in time for the tour of the caves. 

 

I was so glad we brought sweatshirts with us because it was very cold once we got inside the cave!  But it was absolutely spectacular.  The pictures don’t even do it justice.  We saw the most incredible stalactites and stalagmites that were absolutely huge (5-10 feet in length, maybe even more).  The water in the cave was beautiful, and learning about how each of the features was created was amazing.  Unfortunately most of the tour prohibited flash photography, so I don’t have a ton of pictures of the inside.  It was so impressive, though.  One of the coolest parts of the tour was when we entered this very large cavern, and the tour guide shut all the flashlights off to show us just how dark it really was.  We had never experienced true darkness like that – it was really cool!! 

 

We took it a lot slower on the hike back down and stopped to enjoy more of the scenery and read the signs along the way. 

After our long hike we treated ourselves to Café Rio for dinner!  Then it was back to Grandma’s house where the kids CRASHED hard the second their heads hit the pillows. 

It was a wonderful day full of exploring the wonderful world we live in!