Face the challenge and overcome

This past weekend I spent with my Varsity Scouts in a great super activity. Thursday, we met and after getting everyone rounded up and all their gear we went up the canyon and established our base camp.
Remember, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we have experienced an unusual weather pattern of rain, snow, and wind. Thursday it was beginning to clear up but it was cold and it didn't take us long to break out the hot chocolate once the sun began to go down.

Friday morning we loaded up the bikes and traveled to an area called Cascade Springs.
There the group descended 4 miles down Little Deer Creek Canyon only to find that the only way out of the canyon was to climb out the canyon on the trail that probably raised some 1000 feet plus to the ridge line and then once at the summit it was nearly straight down to the Deer Creek Dam below.


This part of the trail we only experienced two casualties. One boy sheared his rear derailer off his bike probably when he jumped over the rock would be my guess and another young man had a flat tire 150 yards from the summit and no one had a repair kit with them; therefore he pushed his bike over the summit and down the trail.

This was only half of the ride, from Deer Creek Dam they followed the trail around the reservoir to Soldier Hollow; which was suppose to be "flat terrain". Needless to say by time they arrived for lunch at Soldier Hollow they had had enough biking for the day.

The rest of the day we swam in the volcanic crater at the Homestead Resort and then played 9 holes of golf at Soldier Hollow before returning to our base camp. A good dutch oven dinner with desert and a little campfire story relating was about all any of us handle before we all went to bed.

Saturday morning we broke camp and took our bikes to a trail head again. This time it was "all downhill" and even paved. 16 miles later we arrived at the lake where we had a boat waiting to take us out to try our skills at inner tube wars, waking boarding and even one solemn skier.

Of course the hot dogger is my son who showed us all how to ski and wake board.


It was a lot of fun and hard work! We faced our challenges and we overcame them.