Bell's Canyon Waterfall

I am going to try and get a little better at updating our blog. I have been terrible. The fact that we don't have a good internet signal at our house makes it difficult, but every once in a while I have some time to kill with a good signal, so I will try to be better about updating at those times.

:) So Jess came to see me a few weekends ago and we went hiking up Bell's Canyon or to Bell's waterfall or something in Sandy. It was a ton of fun, and a much more difficult hike than I was anticipating.
When we started out, you park along the main road that runs along the foothills of Sandy and start your hike walking this pretty trail past all the million dollar houses in that area. However, once you get past them, it felt a lot like hiking in Ephraim or up Nephi canyon which is where I have spent the most time hiking. The only trails I had hiked up to this point in Salt Lake were up Millcreek Canyon. It is a beautiful canyon but it is pretty popular and the trails are pretty well taken care of, whereas this one was a little more rugged, which I like. :)

We hiked a long time following the trail or at least what we thought was the trail. There came a point when we figured we should be about there, but we could not longer even hear the water.

So we finished hiking up the long, rocky, uphill, wash we were hiking. (truth is I am very out of shape and I about died hiking that wash :)...thank goodness Jess was patient with me :) ...

anyway, when we finally got to the top of that and had hiked through a fair amount of snow, and lost track of much of a trail, we decided to head back to where we knew the stream was and see if we could tell if we had missed the waterfall yet or not.

So we trudged through the trees and what do you know...we came out right above the waterfall! How good are we?

Anyway, then we took some pictures, pretended to be Atlas holding up the world with our strength...

and hiked down to the bottom of the falls to see about locating that trail we had missed to head back....no such luck...so we just followed the river down through the thick trees until we found the trail again. I was glad I decided to wear a shirt I didn't care about because through the trail blazing, I managed to rip it a few times.

But it was fun because it felt like we were actually exploring and not just following a mapped out trail that thousands of people walked every year.

The only regret is that it wasn't warm enough when we got to the falls to jump in and play...well there wasn't much water to play in at the bottom, but we could have gotten good and wet. However, we probably would have frozen on the hike back. It had already been drizzling on us the whole hike. :)

But we had a ton of fun. I will need to start looking into more hiking trails, waterfalls, and lakes in the area and explore a little more, because obviously there is more here than I thought there was. :)