Up at Blue!

 

We had a fabulous beginning to the summer with 3ish days up at the cabin on the Blue.  We took off Friday afternoon after Evie's prize giving ceremony to mark the end of kindergarten for her.  Her award this year was for enthusiasm... no great surprise there!  On Saturday we headed to Alpine for a car show and craft fair (for the first time in a long time we got the boys to come up the hill with us... I think the draw of the car show was just enough for them to tolerate the craft fair).  After the festivities I took a much needed nap... turns out Izzy is not so good anymore at the whole go to sleep, get woken up at 11 pm, be put to bed for the first time on a mattress not a crib, try to be convinced that really what she just had was not a nap but prep for a night's sleep... this nap would have been even more needed had my Mom not stepped in at around midnight and through an episode or two of HGTV convinced Izzy to settle in and go to sleep.  While I snoozed Patrick and the girls got all muddy at the stream and he shot a few arrows. Evie made us all some fabulous smores for desert... it was a good day!

Feeding the horse from spring mud (the horse was given to me by my grandfather when I was about her age...)

She was really excited to catch crawdads...

Dead ponderosa without its bark near the top of Escudilla

On Sunday Mom and Dad kept the girls so Patrick and I could make the much anticipated trek to Escudilla where we were married almost 11 years ago now, and where we had not gone for 2 years because of the 2011 fires.  I was really nervous to go up there because I was afraid it would be a wasteland, and while it was certainly very changed it was, in many spots, not as bad as I would have feared.  In fact parts of our hike to the top of Escudilla had a strange beauty to them in their desolateness.  After the hike we soaked in the hot tub (really does it get better than that?!) and aside from an evening hike to set a crawdad trap just hung around for the rest of the day.

Baby aspen trees growing amongst the burnt ones

Near the top of Escudilla, through a sea of dead ponderosa pine

Yesterday we headed home one kid down (Evie is going to hang out with my parents until they come back later this week) with a brief stop at the Gila Box and for the past day the house has felt strangely silent....  All in all though it was a great start to our "summer"!