I just needed to do some art the first day after getting back from the city so I plopped down in front of a group of trees in Becky’s front yard with Becky’s easel. I bought new Micron pens at the beginning of the trip and man do I like using them! I wore out my old set so I had needed them so a while but now it was time to use the brush tip finally. There is something so freeing to the brush tip. You level of control is different from the fine liners. Your curves have more ease and you get varying thicknesses. It’s a medium I feel like I can just relax and doodle with despite there being no way to cover up any mistake.

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Well I decided to draw these trees in their little circle as a little magic clearing. As a child I loved fantasy. My aunt would get me gorgeous picture book of fairies when I was little and there is something nostalgic about that kind of art style, which is loose and pretty. This picture was one of the gifts I gave my aunt for being kind enough to host me for this trip. In the clearing I put Kaya, who would not sit and pose that day but amelessly wandered which made it slightly hard to draw her because I have zero experience drawing dogs, but I tried to make her stand out in the image. I gave the trees faces and put little glowing fairies everywhere in hopes to emulate the style of those books. I had a nice afternoon doodling away. I had just gotten the nice big paper too which was fabulous to work with. All around a solid day.

That Friday though was another hike day. We headed to Logan and Becky’s friend that we had spent the day with at the Salt Lake Arts Fest and her family met us for lunch. Then it was off to the Wind Caves. The hike was considerablly uphill the entire way and at first the heights really freaked me out. Not too far up the trail you can look down off the side of the trail into the valley and onto a road. That road gave me too much of a scale and the trail was a little too narrow for me so I started to panic. Once I started, I could not stop though. Any time the trees parted and you could see out it would start to freak me out but then once I just full on hiperventilated, I was fine. It was out of my system. Carry on. Irrational fears are weird man.

After that though it was just stunning.

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While I was panting by the time we got to the top, it was so worth it. The caves sneak up on you so you really don’t have a gauge of how much longer there is to go. You just turn the corner and there are these weird rock formations sticking out of the mountain. They are pretty similar to Arches but of course they are made of a different rock. These were formed back when the mountains were covered by water and it wore away the softer rock. That factoid provides a better scale of how big the Salt Lake used to be. Absolutely wild.

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There are actually two wind caves. This is the main one and then once you walk through and follow the wall there is another room. You had to get way too close to the edge tho to get into the first one and the ground was slanted with tons of pebbles so I could not make myself go around. There were another girl from one of the groups that was afraid to go too far also so we just hung back and chilled at a safe distance together lol.

Becky though who apparently is just a straight up mountain goat had no problem and she went right up to edge. She hopped across that skinny little bridge connecting the roof too. Even now I cannot fathom but my personal goal at this point is to get over my fear of heights. I have gotten so much better now with just getting exposure to them so I definitely want to go back to Arches at some point and climb the trail to Delicate as well as some of the more difficult ones we missed. I’m determined because now I know that I just need more experience and I’ll be fine. My fear really made me feel weak and so limited but most of the time I was uncomfy I made Becky just let me push through because turning around would have felt like such a failure.

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While we up closer to the northern border of Utah we also went to Bear Lake for the afternoon (you can see Idaho on the other side of the lake!! Hi Idaho!). We severely underestimated how long that trail was going to take us so we actually brought the paddle boards with us to go out on the water but by late afternoon the water was way too strong and choppy. The couple guys who took out their canoes ended up having trouble getting back upstream so we definitely made the right choice.

Bear Lake is know for being incredibly blue. I think it’s due to a mineral in the rock or the microorganisms but the contrast between the pink and blue probably helps too. It actually is crazy vibrant in real life though. These photos look fake but no joke, that’s what it looks like. No wonder it’s nickname is “The Caribbean of the Rockies”.

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Instead of getting in the water we took out the camping chairs from the back of the car and sat down right in the water. After a bit the waves were so intense they started coming up into the chair and getting our pants wet! I decided to just put on my bikini bottoms and not have to deal with wet pants on the ride back. The water was nice and cold after our sweaty hike at the hottest part of the day (oops). We enjoyed the water and played with the rocks in the shallows for a while. I successfully got some pretty good skips but there weren’t a ton of flat rocks to throw. The rocks were gorgeous in their own right too. There were deep reds and light pinks and smooth greys. Becky picked out some and build a little cairn. No I’m sorry Becky– a little cairn a huge cairn.

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After that significant incline from the previous day, we voted to not do another hike on Saturday because we were sore. I finished my pastel of Powder mountain instead. I tried to have some fun with the colors in the rocks and textures of the soft snow (which I used chalk for) and the trees and rock. Becky says that she can recognize Powder so I guess I can pat myself on the back for that one 😉