Happy Birthday, Chelsea!

Chelsea and I have known each other since 2006, and dated for a large portion of the time period, and she has become, by far, my best friend in the time since our last break-up (yes, there were several). We always go all-out for each other's birthdays, and this year I thought it would be fun to go up to Park City and do some hiking. We had initially planned on going up Guardsman Pass from the BCC side, then hiking up to Scott's Bowl and then down to Shadow Lake, which sits by the bottom of the Jupiter chairlift at PCMR. That didn't work out, because Guardsman Pass is still closed to through traffic, which I thought was weird, because I was under the assumption that all the gates opened at about Memorial Day. I was wrong. Instead we drove to the top ridge of the Park City Ridgeline that separates Deer Valley from Wasatch State Park, and the above photo is an HDR Panorama looking toward point 10,420 above Great Western at Brighton, but from the northeast.

We joked that if I had told her four years ago that she'd spend her 26th (ahem, I mean 21st?) birthday climbing mountains, she probably would have laughed in my face. But it was cool because we ended up parking in a Deer Valley parking lot, then hiked all the way over to McKonkey's Bowl, just east of Jupiter Peak inside Park City Mountain Resort. We thought about doing the peak, which only would have been another 25 minutes, but our timing was poor, and the sun had set, and we were improperly dressed, so the temperature was starting to dive. So we headed back to the car, she opened her presents (two seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a Star Wars poster, Muppet Wizard of Oz, a stretchy dragon, and a Big Hissy Fit). The best present is probably the Star Wars poster, and I told her that it's a celebration that she can finally admit that the geek lifestyle is superior to that of other media consumers. 

Provo Peak and Mount Cascade from the north.

The Timber Lakes area east of Heber City, UT.

After hiking and presents, we had dinner at Maxwell's Fat Kid Pizza in Kimball Junction. I think the rest of the world should take a lesson from these guys with regard to portions. We started with an appetizer of french fries. The plate of fries was bigger than most of New Jersey, and the pizza was probably five times the size of the french fries. Approved.