The "Death Hike"

5 miles of death-defying hiking with your kids? Why not?

The plan was to take the boys to "The Waterfall", the place of mountain initiations for years, and initate them. It started out innocently enough, with a placid walk through mountain meadows

Lander hikes through meadow 

but quickly turned into the "hope-our-life insurance-is-up-to-date" hike.

Dixie, Jake, Lander, Stephanie and Grant start to make the climb.

Notice Lander's legs? It's a lot steeper than it looks, and this is just the beginning.

Dixie is praying for her family's safety by this point. See her little red hat below? She's really only about 15 feet from Jake. 

Jake poses for a picture

Oh, whoops, looks like we went up the wrong draw. Down the cliffs we go. See that dead tree? We used it to scale down the mountainside. If you look closely, you can see Grant's blue shirt at the bottom. He was there to help us jump down the last portion.

I thought I was going to die.

And kill off my entire family in one fail swoop.

It was close. Thank you guardian angels for working overtime!

If insanely steep mountainsides weren't bad enough, we had to hop across this boulder field. The boys thought it was fun until we found some bear poo and the realized that bears might be living in the crevices. 

Lander and Jake, before learning about the bears. 

I'm not sure why they were surprised. We had been seeing animal dung all. over. the. place. 

Fortunately, the bears didn't get us. Neither did the cliffs of insanity, and eventually we made it to our destination. 

Lander and "The Waterfall"