We climb to the Wind Caves for a second time this year.

My brother in law, Eric, saw our pictures from our last post and wanted to hike up to the wind cave.  We invited his family to go but his wife stayed to can food with my wife.  Here are the pictures.  Once again we said a prayer for safety and once again we had several incidences but came out safe.  The incidences were falling and scraping along with blisters.  Kylee bumped her head so hard into a rock ceiling that a piece of the rock fell and hit my foot.  She saw stars and had to sit for awhile.  Then last but not least, I did a stupid thing and accidentally discharged my gun.  Fortunately, having had good training since a kid, I had pointed the gun in the right direction and nobody was hurt except our nerves and eardrums.  I'm not sure why it went off but I took it out of my holster and was going to put it in my backpack for awhile as I felt we were above all the bears and relatively out of danger.  I popped out the magazine and went to remove the round from the chamber and while I was trying to rack the slide it caught in my backpack and I let it go.  Then somehow in trying to redo it, it was still caught and I must have hit the trigger and BOOM!.  I felt the sting on my arm of the blast and looked around for blood but fortunately not even a scratch was on me.  The bad thing was we were in an overhang and it was extra loud.  But it taught us all a lesson of what not to do.  Here are the pictures:

In back: Kylee, Eric, Katlyn, Macey.  In Front: Quinn, Alex, me

Behind the waterfall

Kylee hit her head on that overhang in the upper left of the photo
 

Alex waiting for Quinn

Sub-Alpine Fir pinecones
 

Mountain Ash

A couple of nice Photographs I took recently of the Grand Tetons and other things.

Teresa has finished canning for the season and is proudly displaying her work.



Full moon coming up over Housetop Mountain.  Taken a couple days ago



The Grand Tetons on the Idaho side, just after sunset.  Taken last month
 

I took this in October same place as the last photo

 

Took this in October.  My house is somewhere in the first group of houses to the right.

Hal leaves the valley and heads for Ghana to serve a 2 year mission

 

 

 

Wednesday Sept. 4, 2013.  We stopped at our favorite viewing spot of the valley to take one last picture of Hal before he leaves it for two years.  We have a lot of mixed emotions but are glad he made the right choice.  This will be a great learning experience for Hal and for his brothers and sisters as well.   We hope he will bring lots of souls to Christ and will build and strengthen his testimony.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 We spent the night at the Raddison Hotel in Salt Lake City Utah.  Hal and Teresa did a session in the temple while I took the kids around Temple Square and different places in the city.

 

 

 

 

We got to the airport around 8:15 am on Thursday morning the 5th of September, 2013.  We were able to take some photographs before we sent him off.  He looked pretty nervous until we found 2 more missionaries going to the same mission.  We are grateful he decided to go and we found out that he made it safely.