Topaz Mountain

This week has been a very busy one for me. On Tuesday I went up to a campground in Little Cottonwood Canyon with the young women in our ward for their annual Girls' Camp. I helped set up the tents and stuff, and stayed the night with them. We had a lot of fun! I got home Wednesday night, then Thursday I washed everything and packed the car to go camping again, this time with my family. Matt and I dropped Shannon off at her Aunt Kate's house (we didn't want to take her camping in the desert--too hot for babies) and went to meet my sister, Jeny, and her family. We drove out to Topaz Mountain and got our camp set up just as it was getting dark.This is our campground. It doesn't do justice to the actual area we were in because this picture makes it look like there were trees there. These were just some junipers that were very sparse. We were lucky to put our campsite here to get a little bit of shade because Topaz Mountain is in Utah's west desert. The tent in full view is ours. We slept without the fly on because it was warm enough, and the view of the stars was very beautiful.This is a picture of the "hump" with Jeny and family hiking up. Topaz is Utah's state jewel, because this is where it is found in abundance. The sand sparkled in the sunlight, but to find the sherry-colored semi-precious jewel we had to hike up the hump and use a hammer and chisel to dig. Matt was helping me up the hill when a man told us that we wouldn't find anything better up there than down in the wash. Matt told him that since I was pregnant he didn't want me to do much climbing. We found a good spot and started digging. Only a few minutes passed before the man came back with a beautiful topaz. He gave it to us and said it was for the baby. I thought that was the nicest thing! Matt was really good at just looking for a really sparkly rock and he found most of the bigger crystals that we found.
While sitting and digging we kept getting confronted by this little friend. He was a very light brown chipmunk with a fluffy white tail and he wasn't afraid of us at all. I'm pretty sure he was begging for food, but we didn't have anything to feed him.

Here are our treasures. The one on the left on the top is the one that nice man gave us. It's a really pretty color, and will make a nice necklace or something. The rest of them are pretty much worthless, but they are nice to look at!

After the sun went down we went for a little hike up the hill from our campsite. The view from the top was great! We could see how isolated we actually were (the nearest town is 50 miles away). On the ridge you can see Jeny, Mark, and Tara. I forgot to take my camera up there with me, but Jeny took hers, so I will get a picture of the view later.