The Story Of My Summer Part 1

 

L-R: Jessica, Me, and Heather. Taken at the ranch a few weeks before we came home:)

   Oh the joys of a summer spent in meeting new friends, working hard in the garden and kitchen, laughing and visiting, and singing God's praises with those you love. The time flew so fast~ but good memories where made, and God blessed me so much while I was there at the ranch. Lord willing, I'll be going back next summer also. Fun times!

  Probably one of the first exciting things we did  was to go on a (what turned out to be) hours long hike! I'll never forget the fun we had that day! We all started out across the river, and then up into the hills.

 

  And so we hiked for a while, carrying our lunch and our water with us. I snapped photos along the way, and ended up taking quite a few! Up steep hills, through sagebrush and weeds, and down into a small canyon. There where plenty of trees where we stopped for a rest, and we played around for a bit. The guys found a mud puddle of water and decided to dig it out a bit so the dirt would settle down to the bottom, knowing we'd need more water for our group on the way back. There were 8 of us in our group: Ruth, Marcus, Malachi, Mya, Joe, Jeremy, Rebecca (my sis), and yours truly.   

Going down into the canyon; yup, that's Jeremy and Ruth way down there!

 

Digging in the mud puddle...the rest of us where just hangin' out in the cool shade. It was about 95 degrees or so outside.

Marcus, (red shirt) and Jeremy

L-R: Malachi, Joe, Jeremy, Rebecca, and Ruth. Jeremy is blowing through a piece

of grass:)

Then they took it upon themselves to weave grass hats, and declared it was actually cooler; a wonderful shade from the sun. Yes, we are weird~ no, we don't care :) Lol!

Marcus~

L-R: Jeremy, Mya, Malachi and Marcus

  And so we were off again...out of the canyon and across a big field. 

L-R: Malachi, Marcus, Jeremy, Ruth and Mya. Oh, and Cassy, Ruth's Dog.

And down a long road~ I was enjoying it the whole way!

Whoops!

Jeremy; juggling bottles as he ran :)

  We walked for quite a long while, stopping to take one more break. I took some pictures of the scenery and flowers. You should be able to tell by now that I am an avid photographer, and love every minute of it!

 

  We'd been hiking for about two hours when we stopped for lunch in a shady clump of bushes and trees. This is where the story turns very interesting. I noticed that Rebecca didn't eat much for lunch~ not such a good thing for the type of dry hot weather we were walking in.

Eating our delicious lunch

Resting after lunch

  So we started hiking up the hill again, and our goal was to get to the top of the third plateau which was a long way up. Everyone was encouraged to drink plenty of water, and so we all did...or so we thought. At this point, I'll add a few photos of the scenery to give you an idea of the vastness of the landscape, how far up we hiked, and the beauty of it all!

Here in the distance you can see the big field we crossed, coming from the river, and the long road we walked up. Note the black specs in the great expanse of that land. Yes, that is a herd of cows; just for perspective.

And this is where I stopped to take a short rest; the top was in sight and a few of us had already made it to the top. But Rebecca, Joe, and Marcus legged behind and where still a ways down. Then they stopped 

climbing altogether and Marcus yelled up to me that Becca needed me. I was alarmed and dashed down the hill til I reached them. Rebecca was sitting there crying saying she couldn't go any farther. I felt her~ hot. So I grabbed her water bottle~ almost full. We determined that she came down with heat exhaustion and I was ever so thankful to have Ruth with us on that hike; she has some medical experience that came to be useful. After talking it over, we decided that because she didn't have the physical ability at this point to even get up and walk, that we would have to move her someplace that was shady, and then send someone back to the ranch to get help. Joe, Jeremy, Marcus and Ruth took turns carrying her, which was no small thing as you can imagine. It was also stressful for Becca, having to be moved, because of nausea.

 

Once we got her to an 'ideal' place to rest, Jeremy, the fastest of us all, ran the whole way back to the river; it took him 45 min. to an hour to get back, and he only took two 30 second breaks. Then he got into the boat, crossed the river and got back to the ranch. Him and his dad reached us by back roads in the excursion in another hour. So all in all, we ended up waiting for about 2 1/2 hours which wasn't so bad. 

Waiting in the shade~ she started to feel better :)

   Finally they came, and we all piled into the excursion. All felt relieved and better thanks to the ac. :) To get back to the ranch, we drove through Grand Cooley City and Jeremy treated us all to ice cream; which, of course, makes everything better!  

Driving back on that long road we walked on.

We stopped at Grand Coulee Dam to take some photos and eat our ice cream~ and that marks the end of our adventure!

 

  In conclusion, it was one of the most event filled adventures of the summer, and I cherish the memories! I shall tell some more of my memories in the next post, and I hope that this one wasn't too long! Maybe it will help make up for the summer when I couldn't do much blogging lol.:)

~Dani