Sunday Drive

I have been feeling a bit nature deprived.  I've been feeling this way for a while now.  Neil has gone up the canyon a couple of times with the scouts and keeps coming back with glowing reports of the beauty of the earth.  I haven't been snowshoeing yet!   The kids have been reluctant and I have grown weary of the fight.  But today my family was willing to take a spontaneous drive up the canyon for me.  We planned to drive all the way to Cameron Pass where the snow is, but we couldn't leave until after church, around 3 p.m., and Cameron Pass is about 1-1/2 hours away.  As we were driving up the canyon we saw snow-covered cars coming down.  In my imagination it should have been a beautiful, sunny, blue-skied, white piney-treed world.  Not a cloudy, blowing blizzard.  So we started looking for places lower down in the canyon to pull off and at least walk around a bit.  It wasn't my ideal snow-covered world, but it was nature.  We found a campground near the frozen Poudre river and piled out of the car.   The river looked frozen enough to walk on--at least near the edges.  It was actually a blast sliding on the ice, climbing rocks, and posing for pictures.  We had a great time and my nature cup was filled for the time being.  I still want to snowshoe though. . . .  (You will notice that Hayley is absent in the pictures below.  I gave her a choice and a guilt trip, but she was suprisingly immune!  She chose the quiet afternoon at home over the crowed van drive up the canyon.)