Christa and Stephanie visit

And we did a one day alta trip, doing the customary stop at Awful Annies in Auburn



After a brief rest, and an attempt to find the damn northeast corner of the property again, we walked down to Smart's Crossing. We have a new hiking GPS -- a Garmin 60csx with the ultra sensitive Sirf III chipset. The performance of this GPS compared to any other GPS I have used is staggering -- it maintains locks under dense tree cover and acquires satellites quickly. It also has a mode in which it averages readings, and got us down to 7 foot accuracy, if you trust the Garmin error estimates! My workflow was to download shapefiles from the Placer County GIS CD, import into Google Earth, output to waypoints, and upload to the Garmin with GPSbabel.

Anyway, back to Smart's Crossing: It was a hot day, and perfect for a dip in the glacial waters of Bear River. This time, after much shaming and "Baaaaawk bawk bawkbawkbawkbawk" noises from Chloe, I did the jump. The last time I had jumped was in high school, and it didn't seem any shorter of a jump this time. On the way down, I had a 2001: Space Odyssey moment of dilated time, and began to wonder when I was actually going to hit the water. Here I am:


And here is Chloe, doing the by now casual jump off of the ledge (which she did twice)


Christa, being a health care professional, thought better of potentially back shattering jumps and opted out, after conferring with her more reckless sibling

Meanwhile, grandma entertained Zoe, who seemed to really enjoy splashing, trying to drink the water and taste testing the smooth river stones (Zoe enjoyed this too!).