New Home, New Trails

We've been busy exploring the many trails available in the Salt Lake Valley.

A favorite is the trail shown in blue on google earth.  The steep part is Cherry Canyon, which begins at the Orson Smith trailhead.  The lower portion is the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, which continues south for many miles.

Cherry Canyon gains about 4000 feet of altitude in 4 miles, going all the way up the mountain to the base of Lone Peak.

It's a fantastic ride with great views of the mountains and the Salt Lake valley.

In the panorama above, you can see Utah Lake on the right, and the Wasatch Mountains on the left.

We stopped when we reached snow, at about 9100 feet.  The stream shown above comes from melting snow.

The water was clear and cold, just the way a thirsty horse likes it.

Flowers are blooming on the mountain.  A bank of orange poppies attracted out attention.

Near the trailhead, the grass is tall from all the rain we had in May.
Since we've been city folk, the horses have learned to tolerate walkers, joggers, hikers with backpacks, bikers, and an assortment of dogs.

One morning, as we traveled up the Cherry Creek trail, a dozen paragliders swooped down the mountain and passed about 10 feet over our heads.  Boss got a little freaky over that, but he got over it when he found that the big sails and whoo-whooing adventurers were not going to eat him. (The photo above came from Wikipedia.  We were way too busy keeping the horses from running down the mountain to take any photos of the actual event.