On Saturday morning, the day before Easter we decided to go on a nice hike up to the wind caves with Grandpa! Courtney was in California with Jack's family so she wasn't able to go with us and Grandma had just gone the week before and didn't feel like going again. lucky...I have to say that I was so excited to go on this hike...after driving home from Pinetop earlier in the week the desert was so pretty with all the wildflowers, I just couldn't wait to get right in them! Well, to make a "crazy" story short, the hike "to the windcaves" was really great. Not too easy, but not too too hard either, although I had to stop for a couple of breaks! When we got to the caves, we took a couple of pictures, saw a cute little chipmunk and shared an orange. Well, my kids just couldn't be happy with making it to the caves, they all wanted to get up to the "peak". There is a sign at this point of the hike that tells you the terrain gets a lot more dangerous after this point.
We started on the harder part of the hike and at the point where Chris had to pull Grandpa up a cliff, I decided to give up and start making my way slowly back down, since it was so steep and the rocks were NOT stable to walk on. Well, all of a sudden I hear "OUCH" and "Are you OK" I panicked, but was feeling better when Jessica yelled and told me our family was all ok. Well that was short lived, because the next thing I knew this guy came running/falling down the trail and was freaking out - he had fallen into a giant size BEEHIVE! After he lost his footing and fell in, he ran to Chris to help him swat the bees off of him. Chris started beating them with his hat then saw the whole swarm (a black wall) coming right at them! Before the knew it, they (the bees) attached themselves to Chris and my dad and they weren't going to get off. Well, after the first guy passed by me another guy came by swearing/falling all over the place and swatting bees off of him! While I was sitting there yelling for my family to see if everyone was ok, they were running at me and now the bees were on me too. I started running -well falling- down the hill with a swarm of bees on me, swatting them away, trying to kill them with my hat when I looked in my hat and saw 4 bees just haning out inside it - I threw it down the mountain side (sorry about littering), then as I was shaking my head viciously, I lost my Spy sunglasses! I didn't even care I just wanted to get out of there.
Finally, dad caught up with me and we were trying to make our way down - like I said the trail was not very conducive to going fast! He was falling, I was falling and all this time I still did not know where in the world the rest of my family was! Finally, after a while(which seemed like forever) dad and I got Chris on his cell phone and I knew that they were going to start making their way down. The problem was, Jessica, Tyler and Dillon were on the OTHER side of the bees. Tyler had run down to see what was going on and came right through the bees - well Chris and Tyler had to run back through the bees to get Jessica and Dillon! After they reached them and they all started back through the bees again they said you couldn't see where they were going and the noise from the bees was so loud they couldn't hear eachother talk. Tyler was running and didn't see a cliff in front of him by the time he saw it - he had to jump off of a 8 foot drop off and landed on a rock at the bottom and sprained his ankle - the bees stayed with him by the way. So Chris was trying to help Tyler down the mountain and Jessica was left to try and get Dillon down. It was a really big struggle for everyone, Jessica said she felt like just giving in to the bees and let them eat her up - but she knew she was the only one helping Dillon and she knew she had to get him out of there!
The bees kept stinging everyone - all over the head and arms and neck - it really hurt at first, but once they got us a few times you start to not feel the stinging anymore - we were so freaked out about how to just get off that mountain!
Dad was the first one down. 911 had been called so there were fire engines and ambulances all over at the bottom. They checked out dad and pulled at least 30 stingers out of his head, neck and face! I got there and checked to make sure dad was ok, and told the paramedics I was fine, (I got lucky, only 3 or 4 stings) just worried about my family. Jessica and Dillon made it down next and as they were checking Jessica for stingers, 3 more bees flew out of her hair - this is after she had hiked the 20 minutes back down the mountain! I guess they were setting up camp - planning to come in the car with us or something...Jessica also had fallen into some cactus on the way down and that had to be dealt with later at the urgent care in Provo. I think she ended up with around 25 stings. Dillon was pretty good, we thought not too bad - his stings didn't start welting up until about 2-3 days later - when we were still finding stingers in his head. Chris and Tyler finally made their way down the mountain and the paramedics checked them out, pulled tons more stingers out and sent us on our way with instuctions to take some Benadryl. Well, that didn't work so good. Finally after Jessica had been to urgent care and got some medicine, dad decided to go to the doctor too. Everyone just seemed to be getting worse instead of better - almost a week later! Dad shared some steroid medicine with Chris and finally they were all looking normal again.
I don't think we will ever forget that hike that day. I hope my kids will hike again sometime, it might be a while though! At least until all the pretty yellow flowers are gone...
