September 2010

Labor Day Weekend at Mammoth Lakes

Our first day in Mammoth we hiked to a lake and toured an old mining camp to see how much hiking Ellia could take. It was about 1.5 miles round trip and she did so well! That night we stayed in the town of Mammoth lakes. Early the next morning we hiked to rainbow falls and did some other stuff around the area before setting up to camp (sorry we don't have pics, somehow I deleted them...boo.)

We didn't really have dinner planned for that night so we headed to Red's Meadow pack station where there was a little general store and a cafe. We were too late to eat in the cafe but fortunately they were doing an end of season all you can eat BBQ and cobbler complete with entertainment so we raelly lucked out! It was a really fun place and we even got to ride the horse drawn wagon around the property.

The girls always do so well when we camp. This time Jeremy convinced me to try the air mattress and I have to admit, my concerns were mostly invalid and it was a good night's sleep. When Ashlyn would wake up she would crawl over to me and use her head to snuggle up to me and then we'd both fall right back to sleep. I liked it.

One of the coolest things in the park is called Devil's postpile. This is a lava flow that cooled and fractured into hexagon shaped columns (the dumbed down version of what I got from Jer!)

Hexagons are natures most efficient shapes, they are found on turtle shells, honeycomb and even bubbles.

On top of the flow the columns have been scraped flat from a glacier, you can even see the lines (striation lines) from where debry in the glacier scraped across.

We probably hiked nine miles over the three days and the only one she had trouble with was Mono Lake on our last day. Ashlyn had a little more trouble just staying awake.

It was a battle to keep Ellia happy at Mono Lake, our last stop of the trip. The lake is famous for these calcium deposits - similar to those in Midway. They formed when the lake was higher and fresh spring water high in calcium came up through the salt water.

I have been wanting to go to this little "Bugseum" for awhile now and finally took the 20 minute drive. We met some friends there and came out with some painted lady caterpillars to watch grow into butterflys. In fact we had a family home evening with some friends and learned about all God's creatures before taking the caterpillars out to show the girls. Ellia's friend was holding one and it pooped on her - so later when they left Ellia would laugh and say, "they poopod on Brooklyn."

Ellia and I had a special mommy, daughter date this month. I took her to a melodrama puppet show, jack and the bean stalk. she didn't get some of the humor and she actually asked if we could go home once, but once we did she kept referring to the story and saying "fee fie foe fum."