Pancakes Anyone?

After my adventure in Manhattan, I was TOTALLY needing to get up to the mountains with my family. So on Sunday morning, we loaded up the kids, the dog, the backpacks, and the GPS and headed out for a hike.

We decided to hike to Pancake Rocks. We’d been on the trail before to go to Horsethief Falls, but had never taken the additional 2 mile trail to the pancakes. The first 3/4 of a mile is up hill - not bad, but definitely up hill. We were geocaching on the hike, so we took a little detour on the Ring the Peak trail to hunt for our first cache.

Have boulder, will climb.

Half a mile down the trail we got to the location . . . but had no luck to start with. Then Dude (who must’ve actually been listening to me at some point in the past month!) mumbled the finding-the-cache-mantra ”Natural, but out of place . . . natural, but out of place.” He rummaged around under a giant pine tree and found a string hanging from a branch . . . he followed the string and VOILA! We found our first cache of the day.

It’s always fun to see what’s in the caches. This one was a microcache, so there wasn’t really room to trade anything, but they signed the log and left a little bouncy ball anyway.

After back tracking to the regular trail, we finally came to the turnoff for the Pancake Rocks trail. Woo hoo! We were totally unprepared for this little 2 miles one way hike. We didn’t know we would gain 1400 vertical feet in 2 miles of trail . . . that’s like the trail hiking up Pikes Peak. We kept going, switch back after switch back, waiting for it to level out. I have to say I’m proud of the kiddos for doing so awesome - it was toasty in the woods with no breeze - they did awesome just hiking and hiking without complaining.

Dude and Princess always seemed to find something to “do” during our little rest stops.

No they didn’t build that, but it sure was fun to plan on/in/around Off we were back up the trail. We were so excited when the trail leveled off at “the top” cuz when you reach the top, you’re there, right? Wrong! After a brief flat walk, the trail took us DOWN  . . . which of course meant going up on our way back down . . . ya, I know. Turns out we had to go down and up three times after we’d reached the top! But, looking for the geocaches always makes it a bit more interesting - we found cache #2 at a perfect time we all could’ve used a little rest and snack anyway.

Checking out the log is always fun. Dude and Princess also dropped their travel bugs in there . . . we’d picked one up in a cache in MAY when we went to Grand Lake and the other a week or so ago at Fox Run Park - so the bugs are now officially travelling. Yay! Signed the log and Princess traded her compass for a teeny tiny eraser.

Off to the pancakes! We had to be close . . . but we started to doubt it a bit because it seemed like we’d gone more than 2 miles and it didn’t seem like there would be any coolness just around the next bend or at the top of the next hill.

*** I don’t have any idea why we didn’t check the GPS at the beginning to see how many miles we’d hiked so we had some clue. We’re smart that way. GPSes are for geocaching, not personal location, right? ***

We kept on and finally made it here…

… stacks of pancakes! Got butter? Syrup?

Nope . . . but we did have PB&J and chips and water and beef jerky . . . so we all picked our spot for lunch. Dude and Princess always find the coolest spots - literally and figuratively :-)

The boy and his dog always have fun hiking and climbing around. Every little boy should have a dog!

We had to take our family photo - you never know when we’ll get that one shot we want to actually put on the Christmas card.

*** 1) it’s not easy to set a camera up to take your picture higher than the camera will be, even with the coolest little tripod ever made 2) after hiking to the pancakes, it’s not easy to make your legs RUN up rocks and climb a bit to get into the picture before the timer goes off in 10 seconds 3) I have no idea where Duma was when we took the picture - probably off pretending to be a mountain goat. ***

We wandered around for a while and found a REALLY cool old sleigh thingy - wooden skis that were rounded to form the sleigh and they had metal nailed to the bottom so they’d actually go on the snow. Definitely looked like there was a spot to tie up a horse . . . maybe it was old, maybe it wasn’t . . . but it was still cool, and we’ll still pretend it was super old and someone tried to be pulled over the mountain with their horses in winter and had to dump the sleigh and just ride the horses down the other side with all the rocks.

We did find cache #3 on our way down.

On the way up, I may or may not have told the kids they couldn’t possibly be going the right way to get the cache and they needed to get back on the trail because the trails usually turn and go right to the caches when they’re a 1 or 2 difficulty and oh my god you don’t know what’s behind that big stack of boulders and you might get eaten by a mountain lion or you might fall right off a cliff to your death and how would we get you out and I don’t want to return all of your school supplies to the store because I can’t handle going to Walmart twice in one week!

They may or may not have found the cache exactly where they were headed on the way up.

I probably hung my head and apologized to them.

But oh - the pancakes . . . look at the pretty pancakes!

Ahhhhhhh . . . family, rocks, trees, SILENCE, and amazing blue sky with big fluffy white clouds.

Home Sweet Home.