The Phoenix: Epicuriousmothering Rising

  A sunset--but this is just how the sky looked this morning (didn't have a camera) I woke up hours before the sun rose.  It was pitch black out and about 10 degrees F.  I pulled on my thermal running pants, a thermal shirt, a down vest and a reflective heat parka, a heat-tech wool hat, and double layer pair of gloves.  On my head, I put a 150watt head lamp and with my hiking shoes, headed out into the cold, my breath coming out as great puffs of white. I met a dear friend and together we climbed 1500 feet to the top of a mountain of a hill behind our houses, Milly's Mountain a fellow hiker once told us, in the darkness.  We talked about the world we live in, the one we hope for, and how we get to choose our hard.  We got to the top and stopped and turned around three-sixty.  The mountains to the east, Lone Peak, Pfeifferhorn, Box Elder, were perfectly outlined in the pinking sky.  Salt Lake City Valley sparkled and twinkled to the north of us and...

Mount Nebo, about thirty or forty miles as the crow flies, is on fire.  The whole valley is filled with thick smoke and if the wind is wrong, our valley fills with smoke so dense we can hardly see anything at all.  The air is stale with old smoke and burning.  At night, from our dinning room table, we watch the glow of the mountain fire and say quiet prayers that everyone fighting it will be safe and that by some miracle the weather will change and we will get rain (there is none in sight in the next ten days) to help change the tide and lower the fire risk everywhere. Fall in AF Canyon It has been such a bone dry year.  The leaves in the mountains aren't changing, the trees are literally dying.  Everything is dusty and brittle and the air itself smells dry.  The fear of fire in the mountains is with each of us every day.  This record heat of a September doesn't help matters.  There is . . . quite frankly nothing to do but pray that no on...