Hike to the Cross

Saturday Hilary and her family (yes, her WHOLE family -- Lee was in town -- hooray!) invited us to join them on a hike to the cross. I'm sure this cross is there for a purpose and has a name, but nothing at the cross mentioned why it is there. I just know it's up on the mountain and you can see it from our house and other places throughout Spanish Fork.


So, we parked and started hiking. Not long into our hike we discovered that apparently it was the season for two things: cankerworms (also called inchworms, loopers, measuring worms or spanworms -- of course, this is all from my brain, not the Internet :) and mating beetles/stink bugs (they looked like a mix of the two).

So, the cankerworms were hanging from webs in the trees and were trying to drop on us in hopes to make a cocoon on us ... at least that's why the Internet says they're dangling down. (And anything you read online is true, right?) Anyway, since Lee is the tallest (or because he was in the front :) he was elected as the one to clear the way. Therefore he spent his time with a stick waving it back and forth in front of him to clear the trail for us:


The funniest thing ever was when we came around a corner and there was a man walking toward us doing the exact same thing! Too bad they keep falling down from the trees so the path wasn't clear once it had been cleared, if that makes any sense!

Anyway, the trail also was covered in beetles, which freaked out a couple of the kids (especially Z-boy), so we had to convince them to keep moving "so the bugs won't get on you."

Here are Zachary and Brynne trying to avoid them:


In any case, if it were the Browns alone we would have turned around long before now. But since we didn't want to be wimps in front of the Roberts we persisted. Paul carried Shayla in a backpack part of the way up (Hilary did the rest of the way up AND down -- did I mention she's superwoman?), and she loved it. I'm not sure why she wanted to keep her arms up, but she did it for almost the whole way. (I'm talking about Shayla here, not Hilary.) She loved the backpack. It was our first time to use it, and she carried it all around at the top of the mountain in fear we would leave it behind. (She's since been putting her dolls in it and carrying it around. Very cute!)


Anyway, the kids ran ahead much of the time. We regularly had to stop Morgan and Tyler so they wouldn't get out of sight. Here is a picture of them almost to the cross. I didn't notice the HUGE bird while we were there. It looks big enough to have picked up a kid and taken him away!


At the top we got some great pictures. I'm not sure if Shayla was hot or just wanted to show off her cute belly button:


We enjoyed getting a better look at the windmills recently installed at the base of Spanish Fork canyon. Now we're just waiting for them to start turning:



This cute boy is great about smiling for pics:


This cute girl isn't:


Thanks to Hilary for "sneaking up" on Shayla to get this awesome picture since she wouldn't look at me! :)

And on the way down the kids raced ahead again. You can see how far ahead they got in this picture -- look closely and you will see the kids:


In any case, now we can say we've done it. Next time I'll have to find out when the cankerworms aren't in season ....

BTW, since I mentioned being able to find anything on the Web, I just found info on the 37-foot cross in case you're interested:

Erected in 1981, The Escalante Cross sits on top of Dominguez Hill in the foothills of Loafer Mountain above Spanish Fork, Utah. The cross honors the Dominguez and Esclante expedition. In July of 1776, two Franciscan monks, Fathers Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, began an expedition to explore the southwestern United States in search of an overland route from Santa Fe, NM to Monterey, CA. On September 23, 1776 the expedition reached the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon. They climbed the hill now known as Dominguez Hill and became the first white men to see Utah Lake and Utah Valley.