Bates Family Reunion

Every year in June the Bates family has their big reunion. Here are some pix from this years reunion.

Christopher and his cousin's son, Kooper, doing the 3 legged race. They did pretty good for a pair of 3yr olds

Mr Cheeser himself

Chris wanted to join in on the team roping competition. You can't see it but he's swinging his rope around like he's getting ready to rope the steer. He spent A LOT of time practicing roping the steer while we were out there. Not sure if he'll become a bull rider, bronc rider, team roper, or a steer roper.... time will tell, and we'll just keep taking him to rodeos so he can enjoy watching them all.

Practicing his bull riding

a video of him riding the bull.... then he gets distracted by the peacock

This was a pic of him all ready to go to the Delta Rodeo. He's got his cowboy hat, cowboy shirt, wrangler jeans, lace up cowboy boots, and his cowboy belt with a bull rider belt buckle. He's all ready to go!!

Ok so we went to the zoo yet again. I'm thinking I better just get a family membership, then we can go all the time. Mary, Scotty and Ashley came up to SLC this week, so we took all the kids and went to the zoo. Here are some pix from out day at the Utah's Hogle Zoo.

Scotty and Chris hanging out with the giant elephant

Christopher and me in front of the giant elephant

a trip back in time.... first time I took Chris to the zoo, July 2007... he was 3 months old.... compared to 3 yrs old as the pic above.... and yup he still asks Mom to hold him

Chris riding the elephant on the carousel ride

oh yes, he loves riding the carousel...here he's on a seal

Baby Zuri, and her Mommy Christie....Zuri put on quite a show for the crowd after they let her and her mommy back into this area after the keepers cleaned it up.

Zuri the baby elephant playing around

He's still working on measuring up

Scotty and Chris pretending to be Bobcats.... not sure what brought this about, but thats what they were doing.... goof balls

Baby Ashley....she was just too cute to not put on here

GeoCaching

Jared introduced us to Geocaching last week. Its were you go online and get the GPS coordinates for hidden Caches, put the coordinates into your GPS, then go out there and find the Caches. We told the boys that we were going Treasure Hunting. They thought it was pretty cool. They didn't like when we had to sit in the car and drive around to different spots. Once they got out of the car they had a great time searching all around for the "treasures". In a lot of the caches you will find little trinkets that you can take, just as long as you bring something to trade. A lot of the caches we found just had log books that we would sign showing that we had found the cache. Here are some pictures of the "treasure hunting".

Enoch area Caches

Our first cache

Scotty decided that every tin can he found after this was a treasure

Best Buddies

this was at one of the caches....it was just too darn cute not to share

One of the caches was hidden as part of this plastic bird

Christopher and his Cache

Parowan Gap Caches

hiking up to find the cache

that little silver dot in the center is my car, just an idea how far up we hiked

and now we found our cache....or treasure I mean

L to R: George, Christopher, Scotty, & Triston

we found a "Travel Bug" at this cache. We logged this travel bug and now we have to move it to a new cache for someone else to find. Will be interesting to see how long it will take someone to find and log where we put the travel bug.

Some not so nice looking clouds coming our way

we got back to the car just in time for the rain, and then the hail

Parowan Gap Petroglyphs

Parowan Gap is a canyon and passage through the Red Hills west of Parowan Valley. When the first Mormon Pioneers came there in 1849, Chief Wakara, a widely revered and greatly respected Paiute tribal leader, told them that Parowan Gap was "God's Own House." Recent research and observation is making both the scientist and casual visitor take this statement very seriously. There are solar and lunar events that happen there which were created by no human intervention. Phenomena occur which create a natural calendric structuring of the year's times and seasons with a kind of "Primal Logic of Nature". The pre-Columbian Fremont Peoples of the Parowan Valley noticed these yearly events and recorded them by date number and in many symbolic petroglyphic inscriptions. You can learn more about these at www.parowangap.org