Picture Time.

First off:  Happy Canada Day!!!  Canada's my fave.

So I believe I left off at lunchtime...well now.  Every day I leave lab at 11:55 and wait in the courtyard for the Solar kids to come out for lunch.  I listen to one song on my  iPod and try to guess when this building was built:

(I still haven't made a decision.)  At noon the church bells ring, and one to two minutes later they come out of this door:

 

Thursday they were late and I started sending Jenna a text asking what was going on.  Midway through this they come out the door, Nick sees me with my cell phone out and starts cracking up immediately, saying "I knew she'd be upset that we were late!"  Perhaps I'm too predictable?

Later that day we went to the Gravel Pit yet again, this time with Austin in tow.  It is somehow possible to carry on entire conversations with Austin without him actually uttering a word.

Jenna let me get her picture this time!

Friday

John's plane was delayed coming in, but this meant that I got to go with Chris to pick him up!  Robbie came too, because there wasn't much else to do at the time.

Standard ridiculously picturesque Bozeman scenery.

I didn't actually get pictures after this point in the evening.  We walked to MacKenzie River Pizza downtown and ate, then went to bed early because we were going to go hiking early the next day.

Saturday

I introduced John to the wonder that is Donut Man, and it turns out that even breakfast haters can't resist.  Then we joined Robbie, Chris, and Nick for a backpacking adventure to Hyalite Lake.

Everyone at the trailhead.  Robbie and I were lucky and didn't have to carry full-size hiking packs.  We're also the smallest of the group, so maybe it wasn't just luck there.  We walked through a mile-ish of the picture below and that was dandy.

The trail also has over ten waterfalls along it, and we stopped at Arch Falls below.

Understandably named.

Shortly after this we ran into snow, which is something we seem to excel at.

Unfortunately the photo above ended up being the beginning of the end of solid ground.  I slipped once and John made fun of me, but according to him I'm good with the comeuppance, because after that he found every weak spot in the snow that was to be found. 

After trudging through another mile or two of snow, we stopped for lunch and Chris took a group-minus-Chris photo:

I really have no idea what Nick is doing.

After lunch we should have just turned around, but instead decided to climb an impossibly steep, impossibly slippery, impossibly-disastrous-if-you-slid-back-down slope.  This image in no way does it justice.  It must've been a 70-degree incline.  We later figured out that the real trail was covered in over six feet of snow and whoever blazed the one we followed had obviously just been like "screw switchbacks."

We all made it alive to the top!

Unfortunately there was still another mile of snowy, slippery, screw-switchbacks climbing.

But then the trees cleared and we got to the lake...which was nearly frozen over.

We were way-high-up and so small!

What else would we do but decide to camp on six feet of snow by the frozen lake shore?

And so the next order of business was finding enough rocks and dead wood to build a fire pit and its accompanying fire.  Robbie was all over that one.

Then we decided that we needed something to sit on, so the guys provided me with the entertainment of hauling a dead tree to the fire pit (1/3 mile maybe?) and then splitting it in two in the most ridiculous ways possible:

By using sharp rocks!

By jumping in the center!

By sitting on it in unison!  Hilariously, this is what finally broke it.

After this we got out our food and had the tastiest hot dogs that were ever to be had.  Halfway through dinner a lone hiker came up and told us that he had passed someone who we'd seen up there earlier, and that the guy seemed "incredulous" that there were kids up there camping.  The guys thought it highly amusing, but I'm still not sure what to make of it.

After dinner it was time to dry out our socks and shoes.

Robbie's socks got super-dried.

We went to the ledge to watch the sunset:

Then as twilight came upon us we went back to camp and made s'mores (my doing!) and waited for the stars to come out.  That there were more than I'd ever seen goes without saying.

Sunday

We packed up early and managed to do some pretty good controlled sledding down to flatter (walkable) ground.  What took us an hour to climb took about ten minutes to descend.  The rest of the hike was generally nice and downhill, though we stopped from time to time to take pictures of waterfalls.

We returned, cleaned up, passed out, and later that evening John and I went to Plonk in downtown to eat.  It was super-tasty, but most tasty of all was the chocolate platter we had for dessert.  Homemade strawberry ice cream + single-origin-72%-dark-cocoa + mint chocolate + peppery chocolate + two truffles + sea salt and carmel chocolate = AMAZING

Um.  I like chocolate.