Note to self: Stay off dirt roads in winter

Today was Martin Luther King day, so Layne and I both had the day off from school and I didn't have to work, so we decided to go hiking.

Our first stop was the Children's Forest in Leeds. It was pretty nifty! Neither of us had ever been there and it was relatively warm, considering the snow still on the ground and we had dressed for St. George weather (shorts).

Here is the Leeds Creek Kiln with Lucky peeking inside.

Layne's saying hello!

And us! All natural and facing the sun because Layne wanted to get the kiln in the background :)

After walking the trail and checking out the kiln, we decided to "explore" and drive down a road to see where it led...

QUESTION: What makes a 20 mile round-trip drive last 3 hours?
ANSWER: Mud

We decided to take the 24 mile dirt road from Leeds to St. George through the mountains in the middle of winter. Stupid, right? Didn't seem so at the time.
"But if the road is 24 miles from Leeds to St. George...how was your drive only 20?" you ask.
I will tell you.

After getting stuck majorly (taking us more than 10 minutes to get out each time) about 3 times in the thickest, nastiest mud that you have ever seen in your entire life and our optimistic thoughts of "oh, if we can make it out of this and just make it up this hill, it will be drier and then we'll be in St. George in a jiff," we got stuck so bad that Layne thought our only option was for him to get out and push. He opened the door and we were in it so far that the mud came up to the bottom of the door. He trudged around, gathering sticks (which didn't help) and resorted to pushing with me driving (which didn't help either). After trying to "rock" ourselves out of this muck for a good half-hour, some 4-wheelers came up behind us, and asked how we were doing (obviously not well) and then advised us to turn around. They said we had only gone 10 miles and the next 14 were worse than this.

I was trying to take a cool picture of the car and the road in the same frame, but refusing to get out and tromp through the mud produced this:

(see Layne's shoes up head?)

Ugh! Talk about bad news. They obviously had no idea what we went through to get where we were and being told that it would be smarter to turn back was hard to hear.

So we turned around, though definitely disappointed to do so, but surprisingly, we didn't get stuck once on our way back. But this is what we had to show for our adventure:

A starving dog (who wouldn't look away from his food for two seconds for my picture), dirty shoes, stinky husband, filthy car,

and a beautiful view of the mountains!

So even though, sitting at that last spot and thinking we were going to be stuck there forever, we learned a lot of patience from the situation, especially me, and got through it together, laughing. Most of the time. :-D