Shadow Mountain Road

Our day was getting away from us when we decided to take a drive around noon to an area where we had been before, but did not go very far into the National Forest. It is called the Shadow Mountain Road, aka Shadow Mountain Loop. There is a very beautiful house at the start of this road that we've shown before in pictures and we were shocked to see that it was being auctioned on September 8. At any rate, we decided to take the road - all dirt and gravel - for as far as we could go. Almost immediately we ran into this group on horseback that were probably part of the ranch that was nearby:

We drove for what seemed like miles on narrow, twisting and turning, and sometimes steep road, through the thick forest. More than once Josie said we should turn around and go back. My hunting experience and instinct suggested we continue, and we were glad we did. We arrived at the top of the mountain and it opened up into a beautiful meadow. We could see the Tetons and the valley below from this location. Notice the effect of the haze on the clarity of the pictures:

As we were enjoying the views and having a snack that we brought with us, we saw these bikers coming up the hill from the other side:

Another surprise was that we could see the slide area on the mountain top that we visited just within the last week - visible in the center of the photo:

a close up of the slide looks eerie--like the face of an alien:

The summit was filled with wildflowers and Josie got her usual collection of flower photos, some of which are shown below (including butterflies):

and finally, we drove through so many thick stands of Aspens, we had to take this photo of one of them that we went through on the way down:

It turned out to be a great time and the area just keeps producing wonderful surprises and beautiful vistas.

It's back to work at 7 AM as we head into the middle part of August. There are about 7 weeks left and there is still much that we want to see and do...