Saturday

 Well the weather defeated us again but we still had a fun time and it felt so good to go down there.  We drove most the day on Thursday.  The back roads are so confusing and we took a couple wrong turns but we found the trail head we wanted.  It was a big success and it was exciting.  It was pretty winding when we got out of the car but we thought when we hiked down into the canyon we could find a place to camp that wasn't as windy.  We had a fun time hiking down and the kids were cute.  Ruth even loved it and was showing me the best way down.  When it started getting dark we looked around for a place out of the wind.  We found the best we could but it was really hard to set up the tents with the wind.  We were only able to get one of our two tents up so we all slept in one tent.  It worked out really well and we all fit.  It was windy all night and it was blowing so much sand into the tent and the sides were hitting us so we didn't get a ton of sleep.  Our plan was to hike around Friday and leave our big bags and find a better place to camp.  We had fun hiking around but the wind was getting more intense.  It was blowing sand at us and we said we were getting sandblasted.  I lost my Josh Groban hat and Casey's sun glasses blew away.  Oliver said it was a bad day to be skinny because he was going to be blown away.  I swear the wind was gusting over 40 miles an hour.  So we ended up getting our bags and hiking to the car and driving home all night.  We couldn't set up the tent in the wind and we couldn't think of another place that wasn't windy.  The kids were troupers hiking on narrow rock ledges in that wind.  We think we should go in May next year when the spring weather won't be as bad.  Today we cleaned up all the gear and their was so much sand on everything, it was crazy.

Love Rachel