No More Emphysema! Yay Me!

Despite my complaining and need for an inhaler, we have continued hiking. AND BONUS: I am actually enjoying it.

Our typical weekend routine is to wake up saturday and Natalie is REQUIRED to eat. Like a carb and a protein. Or she may actually die. Like sugar crash and turn into a raging crazy bitch.

So that's first. And while I feed myself, Troy is on Avery duty. He feeds her, gets her dressed, and packs the diaper bag and camelback for the next 4 hours. He also gets Optimus ready. He gets his collar and leash, a nalgene of water, and a ziplock bag (we use it as his water bowl) packed. By the time Troy does all this, I am usually fed and dressed with a mug of coffee for the 20 minute drive up to Mt. Charleston.

Right now, we have only been up to Mt. Charleston because it's 20 degrees cooler than Vegas. We are looking forward to going out to Red Rocks when it's cooler. Like maybe in December. I kid. I hope. Whenever the average temperature is around 80 we'll plan a few trips out there. Which may be right before Thanksgiving. But we are running out of trails at Mt. Charleston that are less than 5 miles. I'm not ready to wrap my brain around more than that. So either Troy is going to make me start hiking longer trails, or we need to hit up another site with shorter trails. Sooner rather than later.

This is Troy and Avery and Optimus on a hike that included "rock scrambling." It is exactly what you are picturing in your head. We pretty much hiked up (what looked like) a dried up river/creek bed right in the middle of a canyon. It has water in it in the spring when the snow on the mountain is melting, but in the fall, it is dry. Optimus did great, hopping from rock to rock and Troy did great using hands and feet to climb up. That trail was my FAVORITE hike that we have done so far. We probably went further than we should have with a baby on board, but it was GORGEOUS. We had a snack and some water at the end of the Big falls trail:

This is the next weekend and we hiked a trail called Cathedral Rock. Talk about steep. It was uphill the whole way. There was a trail crew doing some trail restoration and they were all super nice. They had to carry all the tools and things they needed up to where they were doing the work. There was like, 10-12 of them and they had jackhammers, igloo coolers, wheel barrels and other unidentifiable things to me for trail maintenance. Troy was all "ooo that would be so fun!" And I was like, "I can barely hike this trail holding a dog least. How did they hike 2 miles uphill with a giant igloo cooler??" That does NOT sound like fun.

Anyway. The scenery was GORGEOUS!! Look at that. I love this picture. It's frame worthy:

When we got to the top, I snuck in a picture with Avery. We were looking into the sun and Avery was more concerned about eating her snack than posing for the camera. Love her.