On the last weekend in September, our son-in-law, Brian Prince, and our nephew, Jared Hinton, (who also lives in Vegas) came up on Friday night to go hiking with Ken and one of Ken's friends, Dan Sadler, Jr., on Saturday. They hiked the Mill Flat trail on Pine Valley mountain. Ken took a lot of pictures, but I'm not sure he is in any of them! Anyway, I'll let him tell you about their adventure.
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From L to R: Brian Prince, Jared Hinton, and Dan Sadler, Jr.
This past summer, a terrible wildfire ravaged this part of Pine Valley Mountain. You can see the devastation in the background.
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| Jared, who informed me that this was only the second hike he remembers taking with me. The other one was a couple of decades ago, when we hiked the Subway in Zion National Park together. |
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| This photo was meant to capture how quickly nature restores itself after a wildfire. The fire had happened about 2 months previously, and you can already see signs of new plant life on many of the hillsides. |
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| This is a picture of the charred bark of a Ponderosa Pine, with tree sap dripping down the bark in a couple of places. |
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Sometime in the past 150 years or so, someone had hauled a bunch of equipment far up into the canyon and
created a saw mill. Over the years, as I have hiked the canyon about 5 times, I have seen the metal remains of this
old saw mill. Well, subsequent to this summer's wildfire, a powerful rainstorm apparently fell in that area
of the mountain and sent an incredible flood down the canyon, carrying these metal pieces of the saw mill
more than a mile down the canyon.
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| A beautiful butterfly rejuvenating itself in the stream's mud. |
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The aforementioned flood carried an impressive amount of rock and log debris in its
path. periodically, that debris got caught by the remaining standing timber in the
canyon bottom and created some very large log/rock jams.
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As we neared the upper end of the canyon, we found some of the unburned trees' foliage
was turning into beautiful fall colors.
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More of the metallic parts of the old saw mill. This section didn't get carried down
the canyon by the flood.
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| This picture captures a little bit of the flood's devastation. |
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| We found a few wild flowers, like this Columbine, along the way. |
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| This is the very upper reaches of the flood (i.e. where it was just beginning). |
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| Jared and Brian in Mill Flat, where we enjoyed our lunches. |
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Sometimes the flooding left some interesting remains, such as theses rocks resting
precariously on this outstretched log.
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| This large granite rock had a slice split off from it due to the heat of the fire. |
2 comments:
Wonderful pictures! And I'm glad you all did a great hike together! What a good idea for the wives and kids to get together too!
It was cool to see the contrasting pics of after the fire and beautiful fall shots with the leaves changing colors. We have gone on drives in past years up above Cedar City through the mountains and marveled at how gorgeous the mountains are down south. After living on the Wasatch Front so many years, we didn't realize the mountains could be every bit as spectacular down here! You took some great shots, Ken!
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