Saturday, August 7, 2010

Clear Creek Hike


We took a little trip to Castle Dale, UT, to see the Castle Valley Pageant this week and stopped at Clear Creek and did some hiking in Green Canyon on the way down there. Evan and Alisa were with us, as well as Daniel and Elisabeth. We saw some neat things on our way! First stop in the canyon was at a sulfur springs. Didn't take a picture because it smelled so bad, we didn't want to stay long! A little further on the path we saw this toadstool. It was huge! That is Elisabeth's foot next to it. There were also a lot of butterflies and I got a good picture of this one. All my pictures of the swallowtail were blurry.


These are the mountains looking east from the Skyline Drive in Carbon County. The coal mine in the center has the longest running conveyor belt in the world running from there to the tipple that puts the coal into the train cars. Just an interesting little fact that David knew.

As we were coming down the trail out of Green Canyon, a grouse walked right in front of us, puffed out his neck and then strutted down the path in front of us clucking all the time, like he was letting us know that he was the king of this path. He didn't seem to be afraid of us and so we were able to watch him for several minutes. At least I think it was a him. Kind of a fun thing for us all to see.