Sledding

Leif has been taking Eliana and her friend Corinne sledding several times over the past few weeks. It looks like they have a good time!!

From Ellie and Corinne Sledding

From Ellie and Corinne Sledding

From Ellie and Corinne Sledding

From Ellie and Corinne Sledding

From Ellie and Corinne Sledding

(This picture cracks me up!)

From Ellie and Corinne Sledding

Playing with sharp objects...

I don't know why icecicles are co cool, but they are! Even Ellie thinks so...

Snowball!

A little Ellie fix for all of you who have neither her nor snow at your house. =D

Sledding...

As usual, the Christmas decorations went up the day after Thanksgiving. Our house is now full of Christmas cheer! Eliana was SO excited about decorating the tree that she could barely wait for me to assemble it. Yes, we are firm believers in the fake tree, so there is some assembly required.

To help Ellie pass the time until she could help with the decorating, (or to get her out of my hair, I'm not sure which) Leif took Ellie to the hill in the subdivision to go sledding. I already posted pictures of her little look of terror (which crack me up every time I see them!), so I figured I ought to do a post with all the cute pictures from their sledding fun as well...

It gets dark pretty early here these days, so they didn't have much time to sled before the sun went down, but they had a great time all the same!! As they drove past the house, Ellie spotted the bare, lit Christmas tree in the window and declared with a sigh, "Wow! Mommy made it so beautiful!" That was pretty sweet to hear. =D

The need for speed...

... meets the look of fear...

I'm pretty sure she got the need for speed from her daddy. That look of fear must come from me. Poor thing.

Hiking Ousel Falls

Yesterday we went for a little snow hike with our friends Ben, Cathy, and Lily. As you can tell from the picture above, we had a beautiful hike in the frozen woods - lots of snow, flocked trees, and frozen water falls!

We even got Cathy to take a few family pictures for us!

Sledding with Ellie

After the little heat wave we've been having, we finally got some new fresh snow last night! It snowed all day yesterday and last night and this morning, the slow kind of snow that just wafts from the sky alighting on trees, like this:

Flocked trees are great! Not as great as sledding, however, so that's what Leif and Ellie did this afternoon, using Ellie's NEW sled!

(I guess when Leif and Ellie were at Walmart yesterday Leif had a gift card from a return to spend, so he stopped to look at sleds. He and Ellie decided we needed a new sled, and she spied this purple one, exclaiming, "A GIRL sled!!" Guess which one made it home with them?)

We got a two-person sled, and Leif rode down the hill with Ellie a couple times, but mostly she wanted to do it herself. That's pretty common these days. She even dragged the sled up the hill by herself a couple times.

All in all, she had a great time. They were out sledding for quite a while, despite the fact that it was in the single digits. I dressed Ellie in layers and layers of clothes, with two pairs of mittens and hand warmers between them, in hopes that she would stay warm enough. Apparently, it worked! She didn't complain about being cold until Leif said it was time to go. She called me and asked if she could have some hot chocolate, so I got it ready for her while they came home. She enjoyed her hot chocolate, and then, tuckered out as she was from the sledding, collapsed into bed, happy as could be.

Does this look like a beautiful Spring day to you?

Me either. But this is what we woke up to this morning.

Yellowstone in Winter

One of the best things about living here is that we can drive down to Yellowstone for the day, just because we want to. And yesterday, we wanted to. So we climbed into the car and drove the hour and a half or so to the northern entrance to Yellowstone at Gardiner.

Because it's winter, most of the roads in the park are closed to automobiles. But the northern entrance is still open, and there are a couple roads you can still take, at least for a little ways. We don't often head into the park via Gardiner, but it's fun when we do because we get to see the arch.

A little piece of trivia for you... Yellowstone was the first National Park, established in 1872. March 1st, in fact. If you don't believe me, read the sign...

On the way into the park, we were fortunate enough to see 3 bald eagles perched in a tree overlooking a river. They were incredibly majestic, sitting there against the backdrop of the mountains.

Once we were into the park, we made our way through the little town of Mammoth Hot Springs. I think the name should be changed to Elkville, though, because every time we are there we see tons of elk. They seem to think they own the place, and they can apparently read signs and know just where it is that they are supposed to plop down:

As is typical of any trip to the park, we spent most of the day in the car. The winter sun spent most of the day in our eyes. To make Ellie's life a little easier on the long car ride, we let her watch Baby Einstein and covered the seat with a blanket to keep the sun out of her eyes. She is much like her daddy and likes to be in a dark cave...

Winter has got to be the best time to visit Yellowstone. It's definitely the off-season, so there aren't too many people around. The views are spectacular in the cold, clear air, and everything is pristine all covered in snow. It is beautiful.

We decided to get out of the car and go for a little walk about mid-afternoon. So we put on all our snow gear (after our little trek up at Hyalite I was prepared for thigh deep snow this time!!) and headed out along someone else's trail in the snow. As usual, Ellie didn't want to walk in the snow, but she did give it a good try a couple of times, despite being cold.

The snow was mostly packed down, but every so often your foot would fall through and you'd find your leg lost in the snow up to the hip. You can only see one of my legs in the following picture, because the other is covered in snow. In fact, I am standing straight up on that leg, despite the fact that it looks like I am sitting in the snow. As you can imagine, it wasn't a very long walk.

We have been to Yellowstone a number of times, but one thing I have never seen in the park is wolves. They were reintroduced in 1995 and have reportedly been doing very well, but they like to stay out of sight. But while we were out on our little walk, we had the privilege of seeing 4 wolves harassing a few grazing bison. They were beautiful to watch and I was pretty excited to see them this close up. We saw a couple others, too, but they were much farther off.

We were fortunate enough to see another animal that we've never seen inside the park, too: big horn sheep. That's another reason to visit Yellowstone in the winter... all the animals come out to graze. The park is so serene and there seems to be a greater variety of wildlife to be seen. Here are the sheep, searching for a little something to eat:

As the sun started to dip below the horizon, we saw a bull elk grazing by the side of the road. We stopped to admire and in the quiet of the evening we heard the sound of owls hooting in the forest. It is a sound I'd never heard in the wild before and it was ethereal. The hooting echoed through the trees and made me stop and listen in wonder. It was amazing.

We started back home and enjoyed the setting sun over the snowy landscape and it made us both thankful that we live in such a beautiful place.

New Years Hike

This year, for the first time since the 70's, the powers that be plowed the road up to Hyalite. So on New Years Day we took advantage of the plowed road and decided to go for a hike. Amazingly, it was CROWDED up at the reservoir! We had a hard time finding a place to park in the lot. There were people everywhere enjoying the beautiful day and the snow. And we joined them. We put Ellie in her sled and wrapped her up cozy:

Then we set off down the trail with her in tow. We took the trail that winds along the edge of the reservoir. I remembered it being fairly level. I was wrong. It starts out level enough, but soon there were little hills that made the way more difficult. It wouldn't have been so bad, really, except for the fact that on the downside of one such hill Ellie's sled caught Leif's foot and overturned, tossing her into the snow. She didn't much like that and require that we carry her the rest of the way. Every time we suggested she get back in the sled she'd cry, "No sled! No!" Poor girl. As we were pushing naptime, we decided to take the straight and level way back and walk on the lake. It was frozen solid (solid enough for plenty of other people to be out on it!) so I wasn't worried. We made our way off the trail and waded through hip deep snow to reach the ice. It was at this point that I wondered why I hadn't bothered to wear snow pants. We started trekking across the lake and I felt my feet getting wet. I looked down and found myself standing in a couple inches of water and freaked out. To me, a puddle of water on a very deep frozen lake couldn't be a good sign. But Leif assured me that it was just the snow on top the ice melting, so I quickly scurried to the packed down ski and snowmobile trails a few feet away. But as I trudged through the water to get to the packed down snow, I did wonder why I hadn't bothered to put on my snow boots, either...

As we got closer to the boat ramp and parking lot, we saw more and more people. Crazy people. I know many of you reading this think we are crazy for going on a hike in sub-freezing temperatures in the mountains, but I assure you that we were on the sane end of the spectrum. In addition to the other people we saw walking and cross country skiing, there were...

ice fishermen



snowmobilers
(I know the lake is frozen and all, but really?)

And my personal favorite and the winner of the Craziest of the Crazy award...

Scuba Divers!!!

So there you have it. We aren't so crazy after all. Do you see the blocks of ice those people are sitting on?? That confirms that the lake was definitely frozen through. But scuba diving? In the cold? At the beginning of January? UNDER THE ICE??? That, my friends, is crazy.

And so we went back to our car, with Ellie crying to go "nigh night" and headed back down the mountain. We passed the sledders on our way down and were glad they plowed the road this year. It was definitely a good way to start off 2008.