The Night We Almost Got Stuck in the Mountains" or "When the Sign Says, 'Unpassable', You Should Believe It"

Every fall, we head up the mountains in search of fall colors. The mix of pine trees, scrub oak, and aspens provide a dazzling display of green, yellow, orange, and red come September and October.

We've been trying to live it up the last few days before Elena starts D.I. and thought a drive and some frolicking in the mountains would be perfect for a Sunday evening. We decided to take "our drive", which starts on Squaw Peak Road and runs south through the mountains until it comes out in Springville. It's the drive that Eric and I took first took that magical fall five years ago when we were falling in love. Actually, I think we both decided that we were already in love at that point because that is the drive where Eric first played "Te Amo" (our song) for me. (It is truly the most romantic song in the whole world. Have you heard it? It's especially romantic when Eric translates the words for me in a soft voice. But, only I get to hear that. ;))

We ate a rather large, late lunch and decided to take our drive before dinner. I got all of our dinner preparations ready before we left, figuring we'd make it back for an 8:00 dinner, then I put together some snacks for the two and a half to three hour drive and we headed out about a quarter after five.

It was still a little early in the season to see too many colors (the aspens were all still green and some of the scrub oak was turning), but it was still a gorgeous day!

I think Aspen trunks are SO pretty!

A few changing leaves

This was the most gorgeous view of the mountains opening to the valley below- our camera couldn't do it justice.

Not a great picture, but if you look close you can see some of the fall colors on the mountain on the right side.

Some frolicking

Another stunning view - I wish we had a better camera to truly capture it!

So, to all my talented photographer-type friends and family out there: what do you have to do/use to capture both the amazing color of the sunset and the detail of the mountains/scenery?We could either get detailed mountains with no color or color and blurry, dark mountains. Obviously you probably need a better camera ;), but is it just a certain setting (we can access our camera's manual settings) that would make a difference or do you need a large lens or what?

This picture shows a little of the pretty sunset, but doesn't fully capture the color. And Elena would like me to point out her favorite thing in the world, the moon, in the upper left hand corner. :)

Ah, sunset. That's about where our fun ended last night. :) Shortly before sunset, we reached a point with a sign that said "Unpassable for Passenger Cars Beyond This Point" (we drive a 1998 Ford Escort). We'd been driving on a dirt road for the majority of the time already and we'd made the trip before (in our Malibu) and I couldn't remember anything too crazy. But, I also didn't remember that sign.

I turned to Eric, "Do you think it's ok to keep going? We did alright last time, but I don't remember any sign..."

"Yeah, it'll be fine," he said confidently.

Within a few hundred feet, the road got really, really rocky and bumpy. Eric took it slow and did a masterful job navigating and we did alright. Although we passed several jeeps/trucks/SUV's coming the opposite direction who were giving us weird looks, we thought it was going to be no problem - just slow going. Then things started to diversify even more and we started getting little hills to drive over (like jumps on a motocross track), along with the insane rocks. We crawled along - literally crawled. I could have walked faster than we had to drive most of the time in order to not pop a tire or impale the bottom of our car on a large, pointy rock, or fall off the road, or high-center on a "hill". We kept on going and soon stopped seeing any other cars. And then it started to grow dark. I was nervous enough about what we were navigating in the daylight, but trying to make our way in the dark?? The road hadn't turned, so we knew we were headed the right direction, but we had no idea where exactly we were and how much farther we had to go.

We had just maneuvered down a particularly rocky hill, when we saw a line of oil on the other side of the "road", in the last of the twilight. We drove for a few more feet and came upon the large rock that was responsible for starting the oil leak in some unfortunate person's car. At that moment, I realized that there would be no turning around. There was no way our little sedan was going to make it uphill against all the rocks. We were barely scraping by (literally) going downhill.

"What if we hit something and get an oil (or other fluid) leak in our car and our car stops running?" I wondered to myself. "It's freezing outside! The girls are in dresses. I'm in a skirt and t-shirt and Eric's wearing shorts. We have one emergency blanket in the car!" I comforted myself with the fact that we had Eric's cell phone and our handgun with us :). We could probably find reception somewhere to call someone to come rescue us.

We crawled on in the dark and eventually came to a fork in the road - with no signs. I didn't remember any of this. The right side went up a hill, following the city lights and the left side went down hill, away from the city lights. We went left because it looked like the most friendly and natural continuation of the road, although it was a little disheartening leaving the city lights. We continued on and I started to wonder if we were lost. After a while, Eric spoke up and said that he wasn't sure that we went the right way. We were officially lost. However, we were obviously making good down-hill progress, which was a good thing. But, the road got even more rocky and bumpy, which was a bad thing for two reasons: 1. it was really hard on the car and difficult to maneuver and 2. it brought my very full bladder to the forefront of my mind. Eric joked we'd get out of the mountains eventually, but we might come out in Green River. I said I didn't care where we came out as long as we were all in one piece, our car was working, and there was somewhere I could go to the bathroom. A few more minutes went by and Lily started howling to be fed and the bumps and jolts continued.

All of this culminated into our low point of the evening: lost in the pitch-black mountains, crouching behind the car to "relieve" ourselves, and then discovering that Eric's phone was actually dead. Awesome.

As I sat and fed Lily, my irrational fear and overactive imagination went into overdrive. "Okay. now we are really in trouble if something happens to our car. What do we do? Does Eric walk somewhere for help and I stay with kids? No, we shouldn't split up. Do we all walk for help right away? It's so cold! Do we sleep in the car and start walking in the morning? But then we'd be out of water." I took a mental inventory of what supplies we had with us - a first aid kit, one emergency blanket, the gun and one clip of ammo, two half filled water bottles, and a granola bar. Not even a flashlight. "Hmmm... note to self, if we get home alive, I need to get our winter survival car kit together."

We started forward again and alternated between hitting really rough patches of road (I got out of the car to move large rocks out of our way) and decently smooth patches off road. Every once in a while, we caught a comforting glimpse of city lights below through the trees. After another hour or so of crawling along, we started to see definite signs of civilization and lower elevations - the lights of houses above us on the mountain, "no trespassing" signs, fences, etc. It was a beautiful sight. After one last stretch where our car was bouncing so much and so rhythmically it felt like we were on a trampoline, we made it onto beautiful, blessed paved road. And it never looked so good! We didn't know where we were, but after a few minutes Eric thought he recognized things that looked like the left fork of Hobble Creek Canyon (in Springville). As we kept driving, we realized we were indeed in Hobble Creek Canyon!

So there you have it - our epic journey. :) What started out as a two and a half to three hour trip took five hours. The moral of the story is that you should believe the signs when they tell you that the road is unpassable for passenger cars. Sheesh- what a night! (I should also add that this is my dramatic retelling of the story, not Eric's. He kept commenting off an on all night how it was actually kind of a fun night because all the technical driving reminded him of four-wheeling. This was my view - the one who would much rather just sit at home quiet and safe and healthy than have adventure. :))

And one last random bit from the night: When we got home, we found these adorable duck cupcakes on our doorstep from someone in our ward. Aren't they cute?