Brandon's 27th Birthday!

So yesterday for the big day, we decided to try out a hike in one of our trail books and when I say "we" I really mean I attempted to pick out a fun hike and learned that it's harder than it looks. It was about a four mile hike following a "creek" in to a mountain lake called Allen Lake, known for it's trout fishing and rare tree specimen. We would have loved to see it!! The morning was so comical, we had to share it.

Here we are at the trailhead, and yes we're wearing ponchos....red flag right? But we're tough and figured a little rain doesn't hurt anyone. As a side note, I'm not trying to look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, that's just what you get when you combine a back pack, poncho, and attempts to get your puppy to look at the camera.

From rain to snow, little patches in the middle of our trail eventually turned in to full on sledding hills...and here I thought I was going to be wet from sweating!

More and more wetness. Instead of snow, we encountered this little creek on our actual trail, which was cool, but slightly inconvenient seeming my coordination on those surrounding boulders was 2 degrees above non-existent.

So we made it about 3 miles up until we encountered two rapidly moving and assumingly freezing side streams. It's shocking that we hadn't seriously considered turning back until that point, but now we had to wonder if our already wet and freezing feet could handle snowy run off water. Our consensus was NO, no we could not! So here we are making our way back down the trail when we got our first and last ray of sunshine.

Finally, back down to the car, we had to check out the previously mentioned Ditch "Creek." As you can see it looks more like good white water rafting.

So there you go! My big hiking/fishing surprise totally flopped, but Brandon being the eternal optimist will swear that he had a great time. Since I planned it, I can say if anyone made me do that on my birthday, I would be TO'd! Haha, but I'm very grateful for Brandon! He makes any experience fun and memorable! Love you babe!