The Utah half of July

Wow, I am really on a roll today.  I finished my EMT class on July 20 and they did the "graduation" on July 21.  I was the valedictorian of the class and received many awards.  It was fun being the smart person in the class (not prideful I promise).  On July 23, I flew to Utah for my sisters wedding.  I ended up getting extremely sick on the flight over and even though I had big plans on the 24th with my family, we had to cancel many of them from the sickness.  When I say we, I mean my mom and brother.

July 24th is Pioneer Day in Utah and there is a parade and breakfast and fireworks later.  We went to the breakfast and I ran into this fine looking man.  His name is Michael Ballam and he is the local celebrity that restored the Ellen Eccles theatre in Logan and stars in one of the operas every summer.  He is a national opera star as well.  Because I was not feeling well, we went home and I spent the day in bed.

Sarah, my sister's friend practically lived at my parents house over the summer and the night before Luke (my brother) and I got our haircut, she decided to straighten my brother's afro.  It was pretty gross and I had to document it for future generations.  He has the curliest biggest hair of anyone I know.

Chase flew in Friday night and brought this with him.  He carved it himself and we gave it to my sister and her husband for their wedding gift.  Its the Logan temple, didn't he do a good job?!

Katie and Daniel were sealed by our great uncle Grant in the Logan temple.  Here she is in her free wedding dress (funny story, way to long to blog).  She is much older then she looks, she is twenty I promise.

Chase and I started taking random pictures in a doorway, don't we look good?

Katie's photographer was fearless!  Of course my grandmother followed her around everywhere so that she could get the same exact picture!  She is so funny.

Katie and I doing our sister photo.  We took one of these at my wedding also.

Daniel's family had a luncheon at a local restaurant that was very delicious and I gave a toast.  I might have cried just a little bit.  The reception was held at the church property in the hills above Wellsville.  There was Italian ice and my brother and I ended up serving it.  

This is the view from the reception.  Chase and I were the last to leave because we were waiting for the Italian ice man.  The sunset was beautiful!

The next day was Chase's birthday and he wanted to climb the Wellsvilles for it.  We left around noon and it was over 90 degrees.  The trail up the hill is very steep with no shade.  I started feeling like I was getting heat stroke, so we ran down the hill without finishing.

Chase had a birthday cake that was leftover wedding cake, but we sang to him and gave him his birthday presents.  I gave him a brand new climbing rope and my parents gave him parts for his splitboard.  He flew back to California on Monday and I stayed in Utah for another week.

I visited a few friends and then got sick again for a couple of days, I think it was a cold.  My father took friday off work and I hiked Mt. Naomi with my dad and brother while my mother walked around Tony Grove Lake.  There were tons of flowers on the trail, like this columbine.

Dad let Luke carry a doodad up the hill that measured temperature and wind speed.  It was blowing thirty miles an hour at the top.

My dad has made this climb around 5 times.  I loved it.  It had a lot of variety to it, meadows, hills, and a rocky top.  I flew home on Saturday afternoon after being in Utah for two weeks.

First Half of July

July was a very busy month for the Miller household, so it is being broken into two parts.  Chase and I went to Genoa Nevada with his parents for the fourth of July.  We went up on Monday night and came back on Thursday night because I had EMT class on Monday and Friday.  On Tuesday, we went to Silver City Nevada, which is an old mining town.  We rode the steam train from Silver City to Gold City (Chase and his dad love trains)

Chase's dad taking pictures on the train.

Chase and I in front of the steam engine.

We also walked around the town and Chase bought me a beautiful pair of earrings and a bracelet.  They have a nice boardwalk and it feels like a really old town.

The next day (Independence Day) we walked up to the big meadow that Chase and the scouts walked through to get to their lake.  It was gorgeous and peaceful.  

This small pond had many little fish in it.  That day, we were going to swim in Lake Tahoe, but we couldn't find a parking spot anywhere so we walked around Spooner Lake.  We watched the fireworks from our usual spot by one of the schools and went back to the timeshare.  The next day we floated in a raft down the Truckee river with hundreds of other people.  It was a very warm day and it was the highlight of the trip.  Chase and I drove home through Truckee and looked at houses.

We got home from Tahoe on Thursday night and went backpacking on Friday night.  I had to trust Chase to buy the backpacking food and pack for the trip because I had EMT class.  We backpacked into lower Lady Lake during the night.  We hiked six miles into the lake and hiked three of the miles in the dark.  It was kind of scary, but very exhilarating.  There were only two other groups camping around the lake.  The next day, we hiked Madera and Sing peaks.  The picture above is looking down on our lake.  It is the lake next to the forest.

I had a hard time hiking up to the ridge, one reason was because we went straight up a couloir (a snow shoot) that had a minimal amount of snow and I was having difficulties.  Once we got to the top of the ridge and I ate a bunch of jerky, I did better.  The tops of both Madera and Sing Peak were very chossy.  This is me coming down from Madera peak. 

We hiked the ridge line to Sing Peak (Madera is in the background) and ate lunch under a twisted small lodgepole pine that had giant red ants all over it.  We watched a big group hike up the side of Sing Peak while we ate lunch.

When we got to the top of Sing Peak (we had to do some minor rock climbing, Chase was behind me all the time), the large group was still on the top.  It was a group of six older men and six younger men that looked like they were from the ghetto.  They told us they were from Oakland. 

Chase wanted to climb Gale Peak and then go back to camp, but I talked him out of it because it was 2 and we had many miles to go.  We took a circuitous route back to our camp, which meant that we slid down a couloir that actually had snow in it and ended up by this beauty, Chittenden Lake (picture above).  We had to follow a severly unmarked trail back to our camp, it was a good thing that we had the iPad or we would have never made it back.

The next day we packed up and walked the six miles back to our car.  The picture above is the view from our campsite.

The rest of July is on its way!

School after School

So June, finally.  This week I am full of motivation and this was next on my list.  I started the fast track EMT course at the local ambulance company on June 1st.  It took me six weeks and I finished on July 21, so more on that later.  Because of my EMT course, we did not do any big trips for the month of June, just little weekend ones.  

Looking at our calendar, I cannot find a single thing that we did in June, but I did find out that I forgot to write about our Kings Canyon trip that we did the last weekend of May.  

We camped on Friday night and woke up to three inches of snow.  Our tent seems to be attracting a lot of snow.  It was one of the first weekends that the campgrounds were open and we found a brand new camp chair, matches, and hatchet in the bear box.  Then, one of our neighbor campers gave us an almost full can of white gas.  It was like Christmas.   

We ate breakfast and then went to look at the giant sequoias.  The largest grove of the giants is located in the park along with the largest tree in the world.  It was very foggy and cold, so we were not able to see the tops of the trees.  Behind me is the largest tree in the world by volume, the General Sherman Tree.  It is huge!

We saw one bear in a meadow.  It climber over a log and then walked across the trail and up the hill.  Chase made me walk on the trail once he walked up the hill.  I do not like bears and was afraid to walk by it (even though we could not see it anymore)  A group of people were yelling at us from the other side of the trail that there was a bear.  It was quite the commotion. 

There are many caves in Kings Canyon and we visited one of them.  The trail down to the cave had poison oak on both sides of it and Chase felt like his skin was crawling.  It was a neat cave with very many stalactites and stalagmites.

On the drive home, Chase took many pictures of the blooming dogwood.  This is one of my favorites.  Kings Canyon has many cross country ski trails that we are hoping to do after it snows a couple more feet.

Chase went to the boulders on top of the Bald Mountain ridge with his father and took some good pictures.  I think I was studying.

Here is one of Chase's father Chuck.

One one weekend, Chase went to Tahoe with the scouts.  He had to leave late Friday night to get to the cabin they were staying at.  They were going to go canoeing on the Truckee river, but it was too rough.  They ended up canoeing on one of the small lakes around Tahoe. 

The next day, they hiked to Dardanelles Lake (I think it is the right one).  Since it was mid June, the lake was freezing but one of the leaders and one of the boys still went swimming.  Chase was not the leader that swam.  Ready for July?  It is coming!

Graduation Month

Here it is October already and I am stuck blogging about May.  The only thing I remember about May is all the studying I did.  I took 14 credits of upper division biology classes to finish up my degree.  In addition to my finals, I had projects, tests, and papers to get done.  The picture below was my very last day of school.  I was almost late for my lecture and so Chase did not have time to change lenses on the camera.  This is the wide angle lens so I look kind of short.

At Fresno State, there is a general graduation for everyone, individual departments have graduations for their students also.  Instead of a graduation, the biology department had a banquet.  It was the week before the big graduation, so my parents could only make it to one event and I asked them to come to the banquet.  The picture below is me with the friends that got me through microbiology, organic chemistry, and evolution.

The picture below is me with my parents.  

The big graduation was for all of the departments on a very warm saturday morning.  All of the graduates had to wait in the sun for an hour and a half before being led into the Save Mart Center.  This picture was taken as all of us were being led onto the floor.  Can you pick me out?

After the graduation, my grandparents threw an amazing party for me and the fam who came.  I lived with them for the first two and a half years of my university studies and they call me their daughter.  

Chase bought me the beautiful roses, which matched my tassel quite well.  

I am very glad to be done with my degree, especially since I had to visit the biology chair four times my last semester to get my credits smoothed out.  I have applied for the UC-Davis Physicians Assisting program and hope to hear back from them soon about interviews.  Keep your fingers crossed!

April Fun

 I was putting off writing about April because we did so many things.  For my very last spring break at Fresno State, I went to Utah by myself to hang out my sister who was going to school at Southern Utah University in Cedar City.  I drove there on Friday (and got stuck in random traffic jams in the middle of the desert) and we went traveling on Saturday morning.  

We started in Zions National Park that is right next door to Cedar City.  We hiked to the Weeping Wall and hiked to a waterfall coming off a rock.

There is a tunnel that separates the two sides of Zions.  One side has red rock and the other has grey.  This is a picture of the east side.  The mesa in the background is called checkerboard mesa because of the cool grooves in the rock.

That afternoon we drove by Lake Powell and through Monument Valley.  The white spots in the picture above are Native American trailers and houses.  They were right up on the base of the rocks.  It kind of cheapened the view.  That night we slept in a little campground with four other groups.  When we were about to go to bed, Katie locked the car and then shouted.  She had locked the keys in the car. We had to ask the neighboring campers, and the camp host to help us get the car unlocked.  It took about forty minutes.

The next day we drove to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.  I had never been there and loved it. The windows and doors were so small.  I could not believe how small they were.

That night we drove to Arches National Park and hiked to the viewpoint for the Delicate Arch which is on the Utah license plate.  Notice the wind?  Katie and I camped in one of the only remained campsites, because the Moab rock crawler weekend was happening.  It snowed that night and poor Katie almost froze.  I had to keep knocking snow off the tent.

After it snowed for an hour and a half, it rained for another hour and melted all of the snow.  We thought we wouldn't be able to do any hiking, but we got to everything.  The above picture is the Landscape Arch.

Here is Katie scrambling up the trail.  It was so windy while we were hiking.  We were adopted by a nice couple from Alberta who took pictures of Katie and I at the cool arches.  We had to cross a rock dragons back that was eight feet wide and twenty feet down on both sides.  It was blowing 40 miles and hour.

This is the last arch we went to.  We drove back to Katie's apartment after this because we were both tired.  I left Utah two days later after walking around her campus and eating vintage ice cream sodas from a soda jerk.

The day after I got home, we met the other part of my family at Big Bend State Park by the coast.  We went on a ten mile hike with them.

We saw lots of banana slugs.

My mom was not able to make the whole hike, but here are those who did.  Left to Right: Fabian (the German exchange student Luke was exchanging with), Jonas (the year long German exchange student), me, my dad, and my brother Luke.  Chase is taking the picture.

That night, my parents went to a hotel and left us with the boys.  Chase played a climbing game with them with the giant fallen redwood across from our camp, and he played monopoly with them.  While playing monopoly, a raccoon stole trail mix out of Fabian's open backpack and ran up a tree.

Two weeks after the hiking fun, it snowed in the mountains.  We took advantage of the snow and went for one last cross country ski jaunt.  The dog loved it.

Chuck and Sam snow shoed.

One of the lakes behind the Miller's house

One of the trees shedding the snow after the storm.

May is next and it won't be as long, I promise.