Blue Sky Satisfaction

 Just look at that sky. No filters. It was the last day of Christmas break and the temps were closer to spring than winter, bumping 70 with only a gently breeze.  It was also really the first day that we weren't doing something with my family or Jack's family, that someone wasn't a little or a lot sick, or that we weren't tied up with actual work and repairs that needed to happen around the place.  I had so hoped to sneak in visits with more friends, maybe a cup of coffee with at least one, maybe multiple adventure days, but it just wasn't meant to be.  Instead, we traded head colds, used an extraordinary number of tissues, and didn't get out much at all besides trips to my parents or for groceries and chauffeur duty for the in-laws.  I did read a lot of fluff, we watched a million episodes of Mythbusters, and Christmas cooking and baking happened and just kept happening.  But those are not as deeply satisfying as adventure and outdoors, so on this last day of freedom we drove the nearly two hours to the Quartz Mountains and found that adventure.

Bella is not always a very enthusiastic hiker - she takes more breaks than she moves and if we ever do get her going, she over does it, takes a tumble, and then is weepy and never wants to go again.  Today was unusually perfect. No fussing, no quarreling, no excessive breaks.  She was up for anything.  We wandered very poorly marked trails without a map - there is one that I took a picture of but there was a distinct lack of markers and it wasn't much to scale. We were well on our way up one trail and hit a "closed for hunting season" sign so had to do some backtracking.  Jack snagged a geocache. We found the most wonderful walking trail around the bottom of Baldy Point.  It was strictly walking through the woods around the base of the mountain, but it was a really beautiful walk with all sorts of things to explore (caves) and to avoid (bee hives) and to look for (was it a squatch or just a rabbit?).   We made it around the base and almost up to the top of Baldy Point when Miss Bell had a mishap and sat on a prickly pear cactus.  Then we had about twenty minutes of Jack removing cactus spines from Bella's back and shirt.  She was a trooper.  We ended up not going to the top but going off trail around the upper third and down the other side hooking into a trail we had looked for that morning and missed.  Next time we will get the rest of it. Part way around and down, Bell saw a cool outcropping and had to mountain goat up nearly to the top of the mountain to it.  She and I explored up while Jack scouted a way off the mountain.  When she got to her outcrop, the sketch journal came out and she needed an art break to record the mountains across from us.

It was a day of poking with burned sticks, squishing moss, determining what animal likely made what poop, being honked at by wild geese overhead, scaring quail, dumping scree out of our shoes, and throwing away a glove that was just to cactus filled to save. We went up rock faces on hands and knees and sometimes had to come down almost sitting.  We laughed and explored, and Lordy, it was a beautiful last day of freedom.