Camping at Antelope Island

 

This year I decided I wanted us to do several small camping trips instead of a big summer vacation. Leland and I had been camping several times with my parents, but always on those trips my dad would bring all the camping gear, cook all the food and set everything up. We were lucky! I will always look back on those trips fondly. I love camping and I still wanted to go camping so I was determined for us to figure it out.  We started with a small overnight trip at the end of May. 

The first stumbling block came when we tried to find a campsite. All of the campsites I looked at didn't take reservations before Memorial Day. We drove to three different campsites (about 2 hours total of driving) before we finally landed at Antelope Island. Antelope Island is generally miserable in the summer because of all the bugs, but because of a cold front that came through, it ended up being perfect! There were no bugs and it wasn't too terribly cold. 

After driving for so long, we got there right at sunset in time for a quick dinner (hotdogs) and some storm clouds but it never rained on us. Look how beautiful!

The children slept great except for Moses and I slept terribly. It was quite cold and I would have been fine in my sleeping bag, but Moses wanted to be in my bag too and I couldn't fit well and finally Leland took him to the van to sleep so I could get a couple hours of sleep. It was not a great way to convince Leland that camping with kids is fun haha. But I'm happy to report things have been marginally better on our more recent camping trips. 

I woke up at sunrise to the strangest sounding bird I had ever heard. Turns out it was a mockingbird! I had never even known there were mockingbirds in Utah let alone heard one. Maybe only nerdy people like me are as thrilled by this as I am, but it was very cool! You can hear it on the video here. 

We had brought a camp stove but brought the wrong kind of propane can. That's why we had this little practice run ha. We instead cooked the eggs and boiled the water over the fire, the kids were thrilled with that. 

There were no bugs and no dirt! Just gravel and sage brush/grass. There were some stickers but it was pretty nice. The views were so pretty. I took the kids down to the water after breakfast while Leland broke down the camp. 

The water in the Great Salt Lake is so low, it was quite sad. It also led to lots of whining because it was quite a bit further to the water than I thought. Probably more than a mile of walking, sorry kids! We did find some cool things on the beach like whatever this thing was. The kids and I made up things we thought it could be, like part of an airplane, perhaps a bomb, or part of Iron Giant. :)

As you can tell by the coats and sweaters it was still quite cold this morning, probably around 50 degrees and windy. 

After we packed up camp we drove to the other side of the island to see the old ranch.

We saw a huge herd of bison on the way. They crossed the road right in front of us and it reminded me of the herd we saw at Yellowstone last year. Except it's crazy to think this herd only lives about 30 minutes from our house! 

Although we have been to Antelope Island a few times we hadn't been to the ranch before. I was impressed at how much there was to see. The main house as well as the ice house, bunk house, blacksmith shop, and several other buildings. It was really pretty but quite crowded on this Saturday, but my pioneer loving children loved it anyways. At the end a  ranger pointed out two great horned owls sleeping high in the trees near the house, so that was cool to see.