Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City, Our home town. All though we call Salt Lake City home, we are always looking for opportunities to visit other places. As you can see from most of our other blogs we try to do as many adventurous things as we can. We decided to pay some tribute to our great city and write up a little blog of some of the fun things we have done in and around Salt Lake City. We will most likely be adding new things to this all the time as we do more things.

The Leonardo

The Leonardo hosts some of the most interesting exhibitions. I have gone to a previous exhibition about the human body while I was taking a Human Anatomy class in college. I was a little weirded out at first since it is a different kind of art, but it’s cool at the same time and educational. Well we went to The Leonardo Animal Inside Out Body Worlds which was even better! I love animals and find anatomy fascinating so this was an event I didn’t want to miss out on.

The Leonardo Animal Inside Out shows various animals and their anatomical structures. If you have kids that are older than about 8 I think they would enjoy it. If you want to learn more or have questions click here.

The Salt Lake Bees

Every year we usually end up going to a Salt Lake Bees game. Now they aren’t the best team in the league, but I have been there when they’ve had a grand slam which was pretty exciting and we got free grand slam pancakes at IHOP because of it. Anyways, if you love the game, or just the nachos and hot dogs, than going to a bees game is a great family outing.

The best times to go to the games are when they have the fireworks which is usually during the month of July. They let you sit out on the baseball field and lay on your blankets. We have gotten the pass of all passes which includes a season to Seven Peaks Water Park in Provo and Salt Lake City as well as a few Real games and Bees games. It’s a great deal and I recommend getting the pass for the family.

REaL Salt Lake

Our family loves soccer so any chance that we get tickets to go to a ReaL game we take it! The ReaL MLS team plays at the Rio Tinto Stadium in Sandy, UT. We always park on the opposite side of 9000 s. but it’s not a bad walk. There’s always cheap parking on the North side of the stadium where people sell tacos and there’s a pre-game party.

Mount Olympus

Mount Olympus is a one of the valley’s tallest mountains on the east side of the valley. The peak is 9,026 feet and it gains some 4,100 feet over the course of 3.75 miles, making it a fairly steep climb . The trial is somewhat easy to follow. You have to be careful not to get on the Bonneville shoreline trail. There are some signs, but not a lot. The view of the Salt Lake Valley is amazing!

We started the hike at about 9:35 and got to the top at 12:30. we were up there about 25-30 min taking pictures and resting before our descend. We started hiking down at 12:55 and go to our car at 3:25. It was pretty tough hike and our legs hurt for a few days. We went straight to Chipotle after to eat lots of food! We went in September so it wasn’t too hot, but I still ended up drinking all my water(2L) and had to drink some of Dani’s. I would not recommend doing this hike in the heat of the summer!  Click here to see some pictures.

Hidden Falls

This is a small water fall that is up Big Cottonwood Canyon. You park by the big “S” curve and head over to the north side of the road. This is a really small hike we were able to take with my sisters to kids. Right when you get the trail there is a path that goes right and up the mountain, that’s NOT the one. We climbed up that one a little before we realized it was the wrong one. Just follow the creek back to the fall, its only .25 roundtrip hike. There is also an old gated mine entrance there you can take a look at. Click here for pictures.

Rocky Mouth Falls

This one is over in Sandy off of 11330 S. Wasatch Blvd. There is a designated Rocky Mouth Falls parking lot you should park in and then walk through a neighborhood before getting to the trail head that’s wedged between two houses. It’s a fairly small hike. I think it took us 20-30 min to get there. Its a nice little water fall with the perfect little hike. Click here for pictures

Ensign Peak

September of 2014 there was the possibility that utahns living in the northern part of the state among neighboring states would be able to witness the Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights. We went to Ensign Peak, which is a mile north of the State Capital and was the highest spot we could think of that would only take 10 minutes to climb. It was a Friday night around 10 and we had to be careful where we parked our car since the cops give out tickets in the foothill area like old people giving candy to trick or treaters. We hurried up the steep climb in hopes that we could see the lights, and when we got to the top we weren’t the only ones with the same hope, there were more people at top of Ensign Peak than I’ve ever seen up there before. We waited and took pictures of the bright downtown Salt Lake City lights, but we never saw the Northern Lights. I blame the brightness of the city for that, even though I never heard of anyone in Utah seeing the Northern Lights either.

iFLY

For a friend’s birthday we went to the iFLY in Ogden which turned out to be a ton of fun. iFLY is  pretty much indoor skydiving where you suit up the same, but you’re in a large tunnel with fans that keep you floating in the air. We had to go through a brief training where we learned the hand signals the trainer will give us in order to float better while inside the tunnel. We got our helmets and goggles on and one at a time went through the tunnel with the instructor and had a couple minutes at a time getting the hang of it, but once I figured out what made me go higher I had a blast! The instructor had a chance to impress us all with the tricks he can do inside the tunnel speeding from the bottom to the top and back again. It was fun, and even better was that we didn’t even have to pay for it!

Here is a map of the locations listed Above: