Mirror Lake Drive

Magpies were everywhere in Park City. And we were too, over the first couple of days. We ate breakfast at a downtown Park City restaurant about 7 am. We ran into Dave and Judy's friends at another restaurant and they recommended the trip to Mirror Lake. Brenda gathered supplies while I chased magpies and we took off.

We headed out toward Kamas and by the reservoir in fog and rain. But the view of snow patches on the high mountains was enough to encourage us to continue. Besides, we had explored the mountains of Wales in the rain lots of times.

This flower along the river is like the wild geranium in Georgia. It was still wet from the rain.

It had a white variation that was also very beautiful in the rain.

This white cluster had individual blooms about half a centimeter across.

Provo River Falls was the most delightful place on this trip for me. There were multiple cascades as the river tumbled down the rocky slopes from its origin near 10,000 feet.

We followed fhe river downstream a bit to see the crystal clear cascades over the flat rock strata.

We talked with a lady from Idaho and she took the above photo for us. We took a couple of pictures of her to show her children. She recommended the route up the west side of Bear Lake if we were going to the Tetons.

About the time we were getting ready to go, we discovered another set of cascades above the first one we saw. We had been going downstream, and now we set out upstream.

The falls and rapids extended up the mountainside for several hundred yards. It was exhilirating to just be out in the woods and playing around the falls.

It started to rain, but Rod was so keen on closeups of the flowers, he went back out in the rain to shoot some.

Besides the beauty of the flowers, even the growth on the rocks bore testimony to the tenacity of life. These colorful lichens are able to etch the rock, as can be seen in the upper left of the image above.