Why I love Utah

I'm just going to keep it rolling while I'm on a roll...

So I've been WAY into biking lately and I went with the ward on a SWEET bike ride up City Creek. It was such a fun and beautiful ride. I rode my bike almost to the very top and it started to get a little late and I wasn't sure where the top was so I turned around only to find out that I was VERY close to the top. So I turned right back around and finished. I'm so glad I finished because I would have been so upset to find out how close I really was to the top. I guess this lesson can be applied to all sorts of different life lessons. I'm just going to leave it at that.
So last Thursday I went with some awesome friends from the ward on a mountain bike ride. I haven't ridden my mountain bike in a REALLY long time and when I went to pick it up, I almost fell over! It weighs about 10 times my road bike. I rode the Wasatch Crest which starts in Big Cottonwood canyon and ends in Millcreek canyon. This was the PERFECT time to go on a bike ride in this area with the changing colors of the leaves. It was so beautiful it completely took my breath away. It was either that or "puke hill" that we rode our bikes up. This hill was seriously neverending and I had to walk my bike up a lot of the steep parts. But all of that work totally made up for the amazing view we had. On the top of the ridge, you can look over one side and see Solitude (I think that's the ski resort on that side) and on the other side of the ridge is Park City below. At one point we were right on top of the ski slopes on the Park City side. It was awesome and steep and a tiny bit scary.

Thanks to my friend Ryan, we got some AMAZING pictures. I just got to see these pictures, and I am so glad we got a picture of the awesome hill with the pine trees coming down one side of the mountain with the other trees coming down the other side of the mountain. (Are they Aspens?)





So we got going finally on some downhill and I was unfortunate enough to actually endo. I have managed to keep myself from doing an endo all through college when I used to do some crazy rough trails and I start out after 4 years doing an endo. I just couldn't keep my balance very well and the trail was a little small and there was a steep hill off to the left. I for sure shouldn't have fallen, but I totally flipped over the bike and ended up getting tangled in it. As I was flipping over, the handlebars turned and dug into my stomach and somehow I ended on the hill tangled, but once I was on the ground, I didn't stop there and continued to slide down the hill. I think that's where I got this bruise:

Wicked awesome, yeah?

So after that, I was feeling just a tiny bit timid. Haha! I tried to go fast, but I just kept getting a little nervous and that is where more mistakes tend to happen. So anyway, we rode and rode and it got darker and darker. We got into some of the mountain and ended up getting a little lost. I was just a tiny bit nervous, but my mind started turning. Thoughts like, "Well if we really don't find our way out, it's a pretty warm night and we could just cuddle until the morning." Then that led to things like, "What if it starts to get really cold and we have to take drastic measures?" I'm so weird sometimes, but it gave me something to think about as we picked out a trail and pushed our bikes up. By this time it was pretty dark and we were pushing our bikes up this STEEP STEEP small trail that had a bunch of logs we took our bikes up and over. We only had one headlamp for all of us, which I tried to use, but I don't think it really helped at all. We made it to Dog Lake and from there we took our pick of trails to get back to the end of the trail. It was sooooo beautiful to be riding on this awesome mountain all by ourselves. There was NO ONE else on the mountain and it was so peaceful. I would have loved to be hiking through there to enjoy it a little more. The river was somewhere off in the distance, I wasn't really sure where it was because it was so dark. Being in the mountains in the dark walking by a lake, listening to the river, and feeling a light rain. WOW, that is definitely my heaven. I don't think there is anything at all on this earth that could be better.