SLC in January

Over MLK weekend, I flew southwesterly to visit Becky and her little Charlie in Salt Lake City. Becky and I met shortly after we had both moved to Boston and both bid adieu to Boston at the same time. While we were there, we shared a great many wonderful memories and many, many hours of knitting time.

She and her family now live in Salt Lake City where views like the one above are everywhere you turn.

It was fun to meet her little Charlie, to see her hometown and to partake of some winter fun. Although, I use the term "winter" generously as high temps were in the 40s and 50s in the valley while I was there. It was grey and rainy nearly the whole weekend, but we took advantage of a window of nice weather on Saturday to head into the mountains.

I have never been snowshoeing and wanted to give it a try. We chose a trail in the Wasatch National Forest. Our trailhead was off of Little Cottonwood Canyon.

The views were gorgeous and so very hard to capture in pictures. To give you some scale, here is a picture of some trees with little bitty Becky visible.

We ventured off the trail to play in the powder (versus the packed snow on the trail) and came upon this running water.

After we got tired and hot enough (we were so overbundled!), we headed back down to the car and drove up to the lodge at the Snowbird Ski Resort for lunch. As it turns out, not only do my ears hate altitude changes in airplanes, they hate the altitude changes in the mountains too. Basically the whole weekend (and even now) my ears didn't adjust to the altitude leaving my head feeling like its underwater. Because of this and the cloudy skies, we skipped the aerial tram ride with its 3000 ft ascent in 10 minutes. I think my head might have exploded if we had gone on it.

Besides our big outing to the mountain, we did littler jaunts out of the house scheduled around Charlie's routines. Props to all of the parents of young ones out there. This weekend has shown me once again that keeping a baby fed, clean, rested and happy is a pretty consuming task!

We got to partake of some delicious teas and lunch at the Beehive Tea Room after checking out the yarn offerings of Blazing Needles.

And enjoyed an afternoon tea at Caffe D'Bolla before heading for lunch at It's Tofu.

We walked around Temple Square and checked out the little museum that explained the history of the building of the Temple and showcased a scaled model with explanations of what happens inside the building.

A lot of the things we tried to do were thwarted by it being the off-season and a holiday weekend. We tried to go to the Salt Lake City Library to look at the building and climb up to the viewing tower. Despite having checked the website before we went, we still found it closed. I got to peak through a fence to get a little bit of the view. Monday was the best day I had for viewing the surrounding mountain ranges because the inversion that had been present over the weekend had lifted.

I may not have been able to see the library view on my last day in Salt Lake City, but the view when taking off from the airport was magnificent. I believe this shot features the Great Salt Lake. Salt Lake City is a pretty city, indeed and an amazing place to be if you like to be active outside.