Saddle Rock Hikes

We had a fantastic Spring Break week.  I have so much to write about our Spring Break, but feel like 2 days of the break deserve their own post, so here it is.  For a couple of days of break, we went to Wenatchee to stay with my parents.  This was especially exciting for Howard because my 12-year-old nephew, Nick lives with my parents.  Nick walks on water in Howard's eyes.  They both LOVE legos and play so well together.  Anyway, my parents live very close to several hiking trails near the Saddle Ridge area.  The Saddle Ridge looks just like a horse saddle.  You'll see some pictures below.

For our first day of "hiking", we started out on a horse trail.  It's a trail that hikers with horses start out on, because it's so wide (it's an old mining road).  We took several trails off the road to make our own hike.  We hiked for 2.5 hours.  My mom, nephew, Howard, Hazel and I explored and took our time checking all the neat things out.  We forgot anything to carry Hazel in, so she got to ride in the umbrella stroller.  It was interesting, but we made it work.  She slept most of time and didn't seem to mind the bumpy ride.  Howard & Nick found so many cool things to play with - cat tails, an old wrecked car, rocks and sticks to name a few.  

For my mom & I, the coolest part of Day 1 of hiking was finding a cool little treasure box.  We were looking for a bowled-out rock to give the dog (Athena) some water during our snack break.  In digging through a small pile of rocks, we found a small container with a notebook and some other random things in it.  The notebook had the names and dates others had found the box.  We aren't sure if it was a Geo-Cache, but we were pretty proud for finding it without any gadgets.  We left all our names and the date in the notebook.  The previous entry was 2-10-10, over a year ago!

Day 2 of hiking, I took Howard, Nick and Athena on a much tougher high, up to Saddle Ridge.  It's a very steep but somewhat short hike.  It took up about an hour and 15 minutes to get to the top and about 20 minutes to get down.  All our focus and energy was put into climbing.  We saw lots of neat stuff, including someone walking 3 mini horses, lots of fun sticks and some GIRLS (or at least that was the neat part of Nick, the 12-year-old nephew).

All in all, we had an awesome 2 days of FUN and hiking.  My legs are finally feeling better, but the downhill climb from day 2 just about killed my legs.  I love creating these special memories with family!