40/52 Fall Colors!

So I had a hard time choosing pictures this week from a hike we did this past week at Riley Park here. I decided to just narrow it down to a few of them...

Oliver was not really cooperative for these pictures, but this one is not too bad!

He was having the best time collecting acorns on the last part of the hike. He hiked over 1/4 of a mile on his own! It was slow going though...

The trees were quite nice though!

Spring!

Alright, so it really isn't spring yet, but we are back in the 50's now, so it is on my mind (seriously, this is the TX winter I was expecting!). This spring, Sara and I are going to go on a little backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon. We are pretty excited about it because neither of us has seen the Grand Canyon before, and what better way to see it than to hike down into it, camp, and hike back out.

Before I mentioned that I have been playing around with Google Earth. I got into it because I figured out how I could map out hiking trails on it and them export it to our hand-held GPS unit. I thought it would be fun for have that info on there. So, I hop on Google Earth to put our GC hiking trail into it... and now I am a bit nervous, too. Below are pics of our exit trail (I think if you click on them, they can get bigger) - that thin white line zig-zagging almost straight up the wall... yeah, that will be us. I think I had better start getting in shape now, and even then I am going to die (for anyone concerned - we probably won't literally die). I am not sure why this was surprising to me, seeing as how we are hiking down into a famously large canyon, but I think actually visualizing it in '3-D' made me realize what a trail with an altitude change of that many 0's behind the first number would look like.

From A Step Beyond

From A Step Beyond