Trek was fun, I knew it would be, why else would so many youth continue past the cringe of tennis shoes and a skirt just to experience this adventure? Maybe it also had something to do with the hunger. Not the life stealing, 4 ounces of flour a day kind of hunger the pioneers experienced, but just as real. Pres. Mcconkie hit it on the head when he said these youth are hungry for spiritual knowledge. Some of them have been living on so much less than 4 ounces a day that they are willing to "lick the empty flour sacks" just to get a taste. On this trip there were plenty of snacks to be had, and for those who came prepared they left with tummys full and future provisions. I just feel honored to have witnessed it.

I have to admit that I was adequately fed also, some I'm still chewing on. To be in a place that felt so alive with the faithful who died there was more powerful than I expected. While we were at Martin's Cove, the weather was beautiful. It has been a very wet spring and everything was lush and green, completely oppisite to what the pioneers must have experienced, except for the solid mass of rock that sheltered the cove on the east, and the wind....not the freezing, biting wind that brought that early winter in 1856, but the sound of it as it blew over the cove seemed to carry so much more than fresh spring air. Several times it stopped me in my tracks, listening for what I thought I had heard. Then, at the Willie Handcart Memorial site, as I pulled the cart with just my girls up the hill and passed between the men with their hats off and heads bowed, I felt physical pressure all around me, like every woman who has been left to pull on their own was there. The honor was for them, and I was just a decorative whitness standing proxy, amazed by their courage to do what had to be done. These experiences would have been enough but mixed in with all the history of faith and perserverence there was still time for my own questions to be answered as I felt His peace "distil upon (my) soul as the dews from heaven."

Of course I was snapping photos all along, these are just a few....I hope the music doesn't feel irreverent, considering the quarter mile swamp littered with cow pies we trekked through it seemed appropiriate.

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