"Glitter Mountian" and A Diamond Fork Hike

Cruising around pinterest one day, I noticed my friend pinned something called glitter mountain --a place near St. George. I knew we would visit Jeff's parents there soon so I pinned it. 

On our trip down there on a three day weekend in March I proposed it to the family.  They were game, so we went back to the pin (which was from a blog post) and tried to figure out where to go. Um yeah. Not super great directions. There must have been 20 comments on there from people who had gotten lost. We ended up going to the BLM office in St. George, and the guy gave us a great map. 

I thought I'd go ahead and post it here to save anyone else some trouble. The only thing we had trouble with was the last bit. Instead of .9 miles it was more like 1.2. I also remembered from the blog that you should  "look for a white glittery mountain to your right". Right. Here's what we saw:

 Does that look white and glittery to you? Like a mountain? Not to us either. Luckily there were a couple of other cars there, so we pulled over ...and we were there!

 Jeff's dad is a geologist, so he seriously set us up with rock hounding tools.

 We started out just looking at all of the crystals on the ground. When you got close you noticed they were everywhere.

 But then we made out way down into the original quarry. The crystals are gypsum. When I looked it up, I found that if you heat it, it flakes and turns solid white, and becomes something familiar: drywall. 

But in the quarry it was beautiful. It looked so much like scenes out of the new movie "Pan" where they mined "pixum" the magic stone of the pixies that apparently makes you not age or something? Fly? That movie was kind of confusing actually.

 Miners.

 Even Jeff got involved. I just took pictures.

 and this one beautiful clear piece.

 The next day Jeff said was a day just for us. We packed up our bikes and headed to Zion's. I felt guilty about it, but couples need some time too right? 

Once again, I was reminded how lucky I am to live in Utah. The scenery!! I was my usual intimidated by trying to bike with Jeff, but he took it easy on me, and we were able to climb up to the tunnel. To get through it we would have to hitchhike a ride with a stranger, and were kind of creeped out by that and just turned and rode our bikes back down instead.  

 At the top.

 I heard the next week that Diamond Fork 5th water hike was finally open, so Kai and I tried that trail. Very different from our lower Mapleton trails. Many more conifers.

 A beautiful clear green river.

 Mossy trees.

And many of the cliffs were made of this interesting conglomerate rock.

 5th water is actually the trail to the hot springs. We knew we were getting pretty close, since the stream was getting more and more green.

Then suddenly remembered Kai had scouts that night! We ran most of the way back to the car, and he made it in time.

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