G Mountain

On Sunday evening, the skies of the southwestern U.S. were graced by an annular solar eclipse, a relatively rare occurence when the moon passes in front of the sun, causing it to look like a "ring of fire". With a mixed bag of hope that we'd see the eclipse and fear that we might be blinded forever if we did, we headed up G Mountain in Pleasant Grove to see what we could see. Either due to too much cloud cover, bad timing, or lack of bravery to actually look for it, we never saw the eclipse. We did, however, have a fun hike and witness plenty of other little natural wonders.

G Mountain is a little baby of a mountain (I think its real name is actually even Little Mountain), so I always forget how grueling it is to climb it. The trail is pretty exposed for most of the way, offering very little in the way of shade, and it's ridiculously steep for long stretches. Goodbye oxygen, hello huffing and puffing. It probably didn't help that we had just eaten a delicious but large starving-after-church-so-our-eyes-are-bigger-than-our-stomachs kind of dinner.

The mountains here - at least the lower ones - change colors seasonally, from brown in the fall to white in the winter to green in the spring and summer, but they tend to be pretty monochromatic, no matter the season. We saw and captured quite a few bursts of color on our hike, but mostly because they're easy to spot against their big, solid brownish-green background. 

One of the very best parts of hiking around here are the magnificent views. It's easy to like Utah Valley a little better when you're looking down on it in the setting sun; everything looks a lot greener and wetter and a lot less like a concrete jungle from that vantage point. 

Of course we didn't get through a hike without a few pictures of lichens and spikes, both of which are much more common but probably less endearing than the pink flowers and butterflies above; personally, I'm partial to the lichens.

After about half an hour (but it felt like so.much.longer) we made it to the G! Honestly, it's a big ugly mess of metal and concrete plastered on the side of the mountain, but it was a welcome sight. Mostly because it's the finish line (actually, the half-way mark) and there are places to sit. 

The G itself is nothing to write home about, but the views of the valley are pretty great while sitting on it. We found some more colorful flowers and butterflies up there, too. 

On our way up to the G, we saw a shiny, pink Happy Birthday! balloon stuck in the grass, deflated and long forgotten by the princess whose birthday it celebrated. That's not supposed to be here, I said. Don't worry, Drew said (jokingly). Some animal will eat it or take it home to its babies or make a beautiful, shiny nest with it. Mmmhm, precisely, I said. So, we picked it up on the way back down and laid it to rest in the trash can. 

As we were leaving, we saw yellow and purple, decidedly lawn-worthy flowers in the sunset. I'm pretty sure these weren't a part of Mother Nature's original plans for the mountain, but there they are, placed there by the wind, a busy bird or insect, or maybe some gardener's good intentions. However they got here, and even though they might not necessarily belong, they sure are pretty. 

 

Welp, no annular eclipse for us, but there were plenty of other cool things to see and do together on the G. And none of them came with a risk of permanent blindness. I'll take it.