Lots of stuff for us, and Catch-22 for Mom?

First of all, Mom has been doing great!  She has seen two of her doctors, and gotten good reports.  She is learning, slowly, that she has to slow down and take things easy, and it sounds like she is, finally :-)  She is in excellent spirits, and doing well.  But now after this setback, it looks like Isaac is going to give her and lots of other folks a run for the money.  It appears now that Isaac will track to the west of the Tampa-Sarasota area and take aim for Pensacola, and might be a Class 2 storm when it makes landfall.  It's still early so it's anyone''s guess right now.  She has arranged evacuation plans if it comes to that.  We'll keep our fingers crossed for everyone.

Meanwhile we haven't been sitting still.  We have a favorite drive that goes up over the mountain from Midway to Park City that we wanted to do again, we decided to mix it up and do it from Park City back, something we had never done before.  It was actually more than 10 years ago since we last drove it!  Time flies.  First we drove to Park City and had, finally some excellent Chinese food, told you about our jones for it, that solved, and seeing the incredible growth the area has experienced since our visit, we walked around town for awhile.  Very, very quiet.  We are going to assume it's between seasons for them, lots of kids back in school and no snow yet.  But, wow it was slow.  Anyway up and over we went.  You drive up to the top of one of the ski hills and then cut back down the back side of the mountain, funny, now the deserted dirt road we were expecting is all paved.  Here's a couple shots along the way.

Park City Condos

Top of the mountain

A few ski runs

I should also mention the temps are beginning to fall, 47 degrees this morning again, and there are more and more signs of fall coming to the mountains.

Jack Frost is coming!

On the way back, we saw another dirt road we wanted to drive, called Snake Creek road.  It looked like it would climb up high and reconnect with the Alpine Scenic Highway through Sundance, but since it was already almost 4pm we decided to do it the next day.  Good thing we did.  The next morning we left about 10am to drive that road, figuring we would go around the circle and be back to the motorhome for lunch.  We use a GPS in the Jeep, but also use a topo map that Jan is incredible navigating with.  We have been doing this for years and rarely have a problem, so off we went.  Higher and higher we climb, hit a couple forks in the road, choose and keep going and going and going.  Why the hell aren't we coming out on 92, the Alpine Scenic Highway??  After several more miles we come to another fork with a sign showing Cascade is behind us??  That is where we were supposed to turn and come back into 92, what?  So we look hard at the map and the GPS and find out we are miles north of where we are supposed to be and other than turning around there is one way out down along a small creek on a rough very narrow single lane road.  Even so, it was a great ride, scenery was super, even if we had to back up a couple times to allow another jeep to go by.

Beautiful views

Rough road

But finally we came out at a pretty little lake, Tibble Reservoir, and got back to the motorhome for a late lunch at 1:30!

Tibble Lake

Now today, we wanted to do a little hike we had read about to Grotto Falls.  We had to drive south about 25 miles to find the Nebo Loop Road.  It is a scenic byway from Payson to Nephi, 37 miles long, climbing up to over 9300' with excellent scenery.  The road itself is excellent, wide, paved, reminds us of the Cherohola Skyway in Tennesee but much higher.  We found our trailhead, and although only a 3/4 mile hike, it was worth it when we found this pretty little falls.

Grotto Falls

As we stopped for our mid morning coffee at an overlook we glimpsed these elk moving up the hill.  They seemed very wary as they made their way, and we found out later archery season opened today!

Looking out

A few more photos along the way.

Pretty day!

We had an interesting encounter on the way with a bicyclist at an overlook of Mt. Nebo, an 11,929' peak that actually has a trail to the summit.  With binoculars, we could see 10-15 people up on the summit!

Mt. Nebo

The bicyclist we met was biking with two other guys who are training to do a race held up in Logan that is 209 miles long, in one day, and has a 16,000' elevation gain!  Are they nuts??  Anyway, to say they were big cyclists is an understatement, so with Lance Armstrong so much in the news lately I asked him what he thought.  Interestingly, he perked up with my question, said he was a French professor and followed bicycle racing in depth, especially the Tour de France, and had studied the doping issues in not only US studies, but in french ones that have never been translated, and basically said, all of the riders dope and have for some time!  Armstrong, even though he had never been caught, too clever, had over 50 depositions from others who knew or saw him dope.  This guy felt the biggest crime was the fact they were stripping Armstrong of his winnings and giving it to the next guy also guilty of doping.  I have no idea whether this info was true, but we found it very interesting.  Never know who you might run into?  These guys were serious bikers, they were on a 115 mile ride today that climbed over 3900' to the summit of this road!  
Anyway we continued our drive, stopped by the Devil's Kitchen, and interesting formation that looked a lot like a "mini" Byrce Canyon.

Devil's Kitchen

Another excellent day!  Only one more here in Utah before we head west into Idaho.