A few weeks ago, Julie and I spent a night with friends in the ranger station in Farmington Canyon.  You can see their posts and pictures from the weekend here (the Greens – you can only see their blog if you are invited) and here (the Waters).  You can see our pictures here (photoset and slideshow).

After dropping off the kids on Friday afternoon, we stopped at the UofU’s outdoor recreation program (great place to rent all kinds of outdoor equipment) to rent some gaiters and snowshoes (I got some snowshoes as well because I left the split snowboard that I borrowed from a friend at home – ugh)!  I was so mad! 

We got up to the ranger station just before nightfall, got set up, and then started working on food.  After a lengthy and philosophical discussion on whether the breadsticks or pizza should be cooked first, we got the breadsticks cooking.  We then ran into a problem, the pizza was too large in diameter to fit into the compact oven in the ranger station.  It was snug and the paper tray touched the sides of the oven.  There was a warning against letting the paper tray touch the sides of the oven; however, I convinced the others to squeeze the pizza in anyway (what could possible happen right?) .  Well, a few minutes later (I can’t remember if it was Julie or Michelle that first noticed), but smoke was coming from the oven!  We opened the door and the edges of the paper tray were very toasty, blacked, and smokey!  Yikes!  We cut the pizza in half (it was a stuffed pizza so the filling oozed out everywhere) and baked each half separately.  

We then spent the rest of the night talking and playing some fun games.  We played phase 10 (dice edition) and let’s just say I didn’t do very well (OK, OK, I came in dead last place by a long shot and Julie won the game)!  It was a blast to hang out into the wee hours of the morning.  Finally we crashed and slept in a little longer than planned the next morning.  The next morning we all had a sweet breakfast with pancakes, bacon, and eggs.  We had both real and fake maple syrup to put on our pancakes; unfortunately, the fake stuff trumped the real stuff in popularity.  After a quick cleanup we got ready to do some shoe shoeing and photography.  In hindsight we really should have taken some fun photos inside the night before but it didn’t occur to me at the time (bummer). 

The sky was cloudy which made it a lot easier to get nice even exposures in a snowy environment.  For the first half of our hike we didn’t get snowed on; however, the storm moved in and we started getting pounded so we started heading back.  We had never been snowshoeing before and both really enjoyed it.  Thanks to Tyson and Diane for putting the whole thing together.