Fun Saturday Hike

We kept busy yesterday.

Rob and Janet "babysat" (played with their grand kids) in the morning while Katie ran some errands and I went in to work to catch up on some stuff. Reder always has a great time with them, and Ruby certainly doesn't seem to mind (while being left with other people is certainly not OK).

We woke Reder up from his afternoon nap so that we could go hiking. We decided to try going somewhere we had never been - the Gallatin Riverside Trail. It goes from the Storm Castle trial head to the Lava Lake trail head, on the opposite side of the river from the highway.

It poured rain while we were driving to the trail head, so once we got there we we had to wait in the car for a bit, but the rain stopped quickly. We put the kids in the backpacks and headed up a muddy hill. The trail started a ways up the Squaw Creek canyon, and goes over a little ridge before dropping down to the river. It was amazing how abrupt the vegetation change is from the north slope to the south slope. Once we got down to the river Reder both kids wanted out of the backpacks. Easy for Reder, not so good for Ruby - crawling and mud don't mix. So we put Ruby into Reder's backpack. I enjoyed the change as Ruby is much lighter than Reder, and for Katie an empty pack was lighter than Ruby.

We only hiked along the river a little before we decided that we had best be heading back. We did get to see some rafters going down the River - the water is very high. I wondered if Reder would make it up the first hill, but no problem. He just kept going and going. And it started to rain a little, so we told him we had better hurry, so he ran. And ran and ran. We were back to the car in no time! He is a very god hiker. The only high-speed-downhill-out-of-control crash was minor. Here is a video of Reder Running:

After the hike we stopped for dinner at the Gourmet Gas Station. We sat at a big booth which worked great for containing our wild crowd. We hadn't gone out to eat in a long time with the whole family, aside from the adventures with the Graffs in Iowa, but it actually went quite well. We were probably just lucky this time!