Red Rock

Back at the end of March was Spring Break for the school I work at (apparently it's a thing around here to have Spring Break be the week before Easter).  Near the end of the week I decided to take Ann and Ian out to Red Rock Canyon to climb around on the sandstone.  It was busy because of Spring Break, but we still had a good time.  As we were leaving to go back home Ann was telling me how she'd had so much fun and was asking when we'd get to go back (so I consider the outing a huge success!).

Tom told me about this area near an old sandstone quarry where the rock has a low slant, which makes it easy for little kids to climb around.

Ann enjoys getting to use the camera, and I like being able to get pictures of myself every once and a while

I was trying to get Ann and Ian to sit in front of this bush to take a picture and an Asian man asked if I'd like him to take a picture of us all.

I could tell he was at least familiar using DSLR cameras as he had Nikon that he was using to take pictures of his wife and son.

It's fun to see the little bits of color in these desert flowers

We went back down from where we were climbing and back to these rocks that had been cut away

Ian crawling around on the big block

This kid has no fear :)

One of the neat things about climbing around on sandstone is that the stone grips really well to your shoes, making it really easy to just run up and around on.  While we were playing around, we saw two young men just run up the rock.  Ian was like "oh, that's how we do that?  ok!" and tried to scramble up the side of the rock (unfortunately for Ian it was too steep here for him to get very far)

Ann was picking up some red dirt and putting it on this rock.  She told me she was trying to make this stone red.

And back to where we were climbing (we went back and forth two or three times).  Each time we went back up this incline, Ann was more and more confident in her abilities to get up and down by herself

This little one definitely wanted to do things on his own too.  I let him climb up mostly by himself, but insisted that he hold my hand on the way down (we weren't that high up, but you could still hurt yourself if you fell and tumbled down).

Ann said this was a cave :)

Ian wasn't a huge fan of holding my hand on the way down.  So he eventually would just sit down instead and bum-scoot.  He was very dirty and dusty by the time we left :)