We Came, We Saw, It Snowed...

Last weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to hang out with my good friend Tyler. We had planned a camping trip with some people that just ended up being the two of us. We planned to go to City of Rocks near Almo ID. We headed out early Saturday morning and headed north. I had watched the weather for Almo all week and the forecast was some scattered showers in the afternoon, which was fine, I don't mind some rain ;)

When we left Salt Lake it was actually pretty sunny, but as we traveled north the clouds became thicker. Truthfully it was really beautiful. The puffy grey-blue clouds the dark snow tipped mountains and the endless green fields...I just kept saying out loud "wow, it's so beautiful out here!"

As we headed down the "highway" of 81 (on which we did not see a single other vehicle) and we saw signs to City of Rocks so we started following them. Little did we know that while these signs certainly did get us there, they got us there in the most rural way possible on awesome dirt roads with no names. I don't think I've ever been anywhere this rural before. We passed through the ghost town of Naf, which don't worry isn't on any map anywhere, I checked. And we came to a super cool abandoned house that we called "The House the Tim Burton Built", and so of course we had to stop so I could explore and take some pictures...






We then continued on our way to City of Rocks and as we approached the sky was getting a bit darker and it was raining a little on and off. Upon arriving our first order of business was to find our campsite which was no simple task...we had to ask a nice man from the Idaho Fish and Game dept. He gave us directions that included about 7 different steps which we failed at remembering after getting back in the car. But no worries we continued on into the park. We stopped at the first large granite boulder we found hopped out of the car and climbed to the top.

By the time we got to the top it was raining pretty hard. We got down and got back in the car and continued down the clay roads but the further we traversed the more apparent it became that rain+clay road+truck=potential "stuckage." And then it happened...in a matter of minutes the rain turned to sleet and the sleet turned into snow. And I'm not talking about wimpy mini snow, I'm talking about hardcore big huge flakes the size of a silver dollar snow.

Honestly it was pretty laughable. I mean the reason I wanted to go to City of Rocks is because I had seen pictures like this:

But what we ended up seeing was this:

and then this:
We couldn't stay long because the roads were deteriorating rapidly but I will say that the whole 30-45minutes I was in the park were pretty cool. We headed back to Almo where we discovered that the only gas station in town was...yep out of gas for the entire weekend. So we ended up having to drive 30 miles down the road to Malta. Once in Malta with a full tank of gas we realized we had a decision to make. We could go back to Punxsutawney or we could stay there an freeze to death, and let me tell you we thought about it for a while ;)

Of course in the end when we considered 1.)the inch of standing water that had been everywhere in the park (I mean who wants to camp in a pond right?) 2.) The fact that the next day was supposed to have worse weather and 3.) When we were there NO ONE else was anywhere to be seen...we decided to just drive home. So in the end yes we went home...stopping in Odgen to have a fabulous steak and lamb dinner at McCool's and then at home we pitched a tent in the living room put on a movie and fell asleep. It was a pretty fabulous day.

**nice photo of City of Rocks borrowed without permission from Dad's awesome photo collection...thanks Dad ;)