St. George Weekend - Cinder Cone Hike

The main hike that we wanted to do while we were in St. George was "Jenny's Canyon."

Of course...it was closed.

So we read the descriptions of the other hikes and thought that "Cinder Cone" sounded cool.  It was marked as difficult, but it was only a mile long.  We're good hikers, so we figured, "how hard can it be if it's only a mile?"

There was another family that overheard us talking about doing it and they decided to do it too.  They weren't sure if it was safe for kids, but if they we were doing it, they figured it must be safe.

We actually, had no idea what we were doing though...

The hike to the top wasn't too bad.  It wrapped around the mountain, and then finally up to the top.  Cinder cone is an old volcano, so the kids thought it was cool to look inside.

There was another volcano just in front of us too:

Another family shot:

Thank goodness we had Mike...we never get family pictures LOL.

While we were standing at the top of the volcano, we see some kids come up over the top.  But they didn't wrap around the mountain, they came straight up.  They even brought their dog.  So Mike looks it up and says that there is a trail that goes straight down.  It looks way faster than the trail we took up.  We couldn't actually see the trail though because we would have to walk around the top rim of the volcano and back to the front in order to see it.  But the kids were tired so "shorter and faster" sounded awesome.  We were so excited about it that we even talked all of the other families into taking the shorter trail too!

Yeah.

Well, the "shorter" trail was a straight, steep, shot straight down the front of the mountain.  It was half dirt, and half volcanic rock.  It was slippery and very steep.  Dalton was in Nate's arms and started freaking out and getting too wiggly for Nate to safely hold him and make his way down the mountain.  So I took him, but I was so off-balance with the wiggly, crying baby, that I was afraid I was going to fall.

I finally asked Dalton, "What do you want!!"

"Mike."

Of course.

So, I pass him off to Mike where he settles down and is happy.

I was the last in the group and the path was getting kind of treacherous so I called up to Mike to see how he was doing with the baby.  He didn't answer.  I leaned over the edge to see and saw Mike sliding down the mountain on his butt with baby on his lap.  Baby Dalton was cracking up.  He loved it.

Eventually, we slid/fell/stumbled/crawled our way down the face of the mountain.

It probably took twice as long as if we had taken the real trail.

And all of the families behind us were struggling too.

Oops.

Mike said that the moral of the lesson is that you are an example even if you don't mean to be, so make sure you make good choices.  Shorter isn't always better, or smarter.

Lesson learned.

Since we survived, we laughed the whole way home and then all took long showers!