Blacksmith Fork Canyon 2016

I rave about Blacksmith Fork every year.  Once again, we camped there and had an almost perfect trip!

Our firepit area was surrounded by trees.  On our first night, after all the kids were put to bed, the grown ups were sitting around the fire when Bryan looked up in the tree above my head and joked that there was a wad of toilet paper above me.  We all looked at it and thought, ew, gross, how did a wad of used toilet paper get in the tree?  Then I wondered for a minute if it was a bee's nest or something.  It just looked weird.  Anyway, we got up and pulled the branch down a little bit to get a closer look and realized it was a bird's nest....

...and look what was inside!  Scrawny, little, ugly, teeny, baby birds!  They probably hatched that very day.  They had no feathers at all and their eyes were all still shut as you can see.  Super ugly but cute at the same time somehow!

 We were worried that with all the people, and noisy kids, and dog, and the campfire smoke, etc, that the mama bird might not come back....

...but she was a good mama who didn't really care about us.  She came and went for the whole 3 days, feeding her chirping babies.  Really sweet!

Here's Bryan and Parker, chilling out.  Bryan doesn't like to sit still for long, so this was a rare moment. :)

 Now this is more like it--monkey Bryan up the tree, setting up the zipline.

 He is almost always able to find a pretty decent spot for the zipline.  Each time it's a little different, and this time the zipline went over this little dip in our camping spot.  So, in order to ride, you had to have a friend pull the rope, while running along the dirt and down the dip, back up to the other tree, to finally let go of the rope for your ride.

Here's Tess:

Or, if you didn't want to find someone to pull you, you could just do it "Tarzan" style where you run and dangle over the dip, holding the zipline with your hands instead of sitting on it, like Miles is doing here:

Here's Bree:

And me:

And Bryan:

 Unfortunately here is where our trip took a turn for the worse...  Bryan's sister Johanna decided to do the Tarzan style and when she was over the dip part she fell and hurt her leg really bad.  She couldn't put any weight on it at all and she was in a lot of pain.  Burke decided to take her down to Logan to the hospital and unfortunately it turned out that her tibia was broken.  Dang!  We all felt terrible.  So Burke took her home to rest for the remainder of the weekend.  He came back up and the rest of the trip was great, but we all felt bad for poor Aunt Johanna!    :(

On a lighter note, Tess has become quite the little butterfly whisperer.  She and Adrienne caught a few and just held them in their hands.  So pretty.

 Bree was Bryan's Jeep riding buddy.  Here they are about to forge the river.  It's pretty fun with the doors off!

And a beautiful view with 2 beautiful cousins!

Another exciting ride in the Jeep, this time up the boulder field.

So the broken leg was definitely a downer, but the rest of us still had a fun trip otherwise.  (And yes, we banned "Tarzan" style after that! :)