horseshoe, hurray!

We we to Bear Gulch on Saturday. Mom wanted to see Horseshoe Lake again. We stopped in Ashton (which was under heavy road construction, thought I'd mention that) for snacks, and then headed to the forest. For awhile we were driving through green and gold fields, and then, TA-DA, we were surrounded by the elegant, massive green of the forest! We were awed! Mom took lots of photographs. (By the way, we were in bear country. ^_^)

We were looking for the lake and I expected that we'd never get there. I finally saw the lake through the trees, but we couldn't pull up close to it because we'd arrived at a huge puddle that we'd probably get stuck in. So we got out of the car and started to hike.

Mom was overjoyed to see her lake! She snapped photo after photo. We finally started our trek around the lake. I saw a juvenile delinquents came where they had a barn-looking building for the delinquents to sleep. The roof reached all the way to the ground. We explored the camp

and I thought it might be fun to stay there, but I didn't want to break the law or anything to get there. They had a dock and a floating raft thing in the middle of the lake. The water looked clear and pretty, and I had an urge to jump in and just start swimming! Maybe we can go back and canoe sometime.

We had gone pretty far, but then we reached another section of the lake that we hadn't seen before. It seemed to be composed completely of runoff water, so the ground was terribly soggy. There were fallen trees all over the ground, so I used them to avoid getting my pink Converse shoes wet. We tried to talk as loud as we could to avoid getting eaten by bears. I was pretty nervous about that. I tried to act like I wasn't nervous, but I think it was pretty obvious. Mom was being funny about the wet ground. She said, "Rock--stick--grass!"when she jumped onto different things to avoid soaking herself. We were joking happily as we walked around the lake, and we saw some interesting things--you make what you want of this tree.

Soon the logs and bushes were too thick to go over or through, so we pushed through the thorns deeper to get to dry ground up in the forest. I thought that we would get lost and never find our way back to the car, but we did. By then our pants had streaks of dirt on them and I was tired--again! I'd already gardened that day.