Snow Day!

One of the reasons I love leaving in Arizona is that we can enjoy glorious temperatures year-round, with four mild seasons where we are.  We had some fairly significant rain last week, which left the mountains to the north of us topped with snow - Beautiful!

We decided to head up to the Coronado National Forest last weekend to bring down some firewood. The Forestry Department is constantly felling trees that are dead in order to keep the risk of forest fires at bay.  They cut the wood into "rounds" and pile them along the side of the mountain roads for the public to collect for firewood.  You do have to get a permit, which is odd, because we are doing the public a favor by reducing the fire danger, right?

Isaac and Joshua were so excited to go "up the mountain" and hopefully see some snow.  Boy, did they have a blast!  Firewood?  Not so good.......very picked over the weekend before Christmas.  But we will head back up another time.

The switchbacks up here were a bit hair-raising at times.  We went up to 8,000 feet!

And yes, here's David, who at 15 is still learning what "Dress warmly!" means.

Snowball fight in process!

I had to discreetly take a picture of this poor young lady 

who seemed very under-dressed for the weather!

 There's Mr. Muscles bringing home some firewood!

Joe and David found a few reasonably small logs that they loaded up, but not the

smaller rounds that we were expecting to bring home.

One more round of snowball making as we headed back down the mountains.

And the very best part of it all?  We got to enjoy the cold and the beauty of the snow, and

then we got to leave it as we headed back down in altitude!

A win-win experience for sure!!