Hot Dogs in a Hail Storm

While visiting my family in Utah, my older sister and her husband had planned up a great hot dog cookout! It sounded fantastic! We got all our hot dog roasting things together and headed up the mountain. My sister and her husband were in the red car in front of us. They showed us the way to the perfect hot dot roasting campsite! Little Cowpoke was ever so excited to go up into the mountains. He insisted that all the roads were going to be rocky and bumpy. But to his surprise, they were all smooth! The mountains are always so beautiful. I have missed seeing them in the spring time. I normally only go home during the winter months so we normally only see snow. The green trees were a wonderful site. There are a lot of little towns up in the canyon. It always makes me wonder what those people do in the winter? With all that snow! It sure doesn't sound like fun to me. How can one ride a horse in all that snow? I guess they have snowmobiles and not horses. But the farther up we went, the colder it got and more of the white stuff popped up. This is Snowbird Ski Resort. The hotel there is The Cliff. I was amazed that there was still snow up there in June. I think people in Louisiana wouldn't know what to do if it snowed in June! You could still see where there used to be nicely groomed ski hills. I don't like to ski at Snowbird. There are always too many snowboarders!! I was getting a bit concerned about the outside temperature. It kept getting colder and we kept going up. I only had a light weight cotton zip up hoodie. I was not prepared for cold June weather. As we passed Alta Ski Resort the road ended. Well, the road we wanted to take ended with a large "Road Closed" sign. So, we talked it over with the leader of the pack! There is my fabulous sister and her totally FUN husband! Little Cowpoke says that Uncle A is crazy fun. I agree, he is a lot of fun. We decided to go down the canyon a bit and go to a camp site we had passed up. I love all the Aspen trees. They are so cool! But we finally found the perfect campsite. Little Cowpoke wanted to sleep there. I just wanted to get a fire started so we could eat hot dogs! Uncle A got to work. He chopped some kindling and started to get the fire pit prepared for lighting. As he chopped away, the lady folk got ready to eat, and took pictures. Cowpokette found herself a seat while Little Cowpoke took some pictures. My sister brought him a camera to take some pictures with. Little Cowpoke was so excited about that. I need to find that camera and develop those pictures. I bet it was an interesting view if the campsite. Uncle A was getting the "log cabin" stack ready for lighting. We are getting close to fire time! There was this little creek that ran right by our picnic table. There was a little smoke house too. It really was a beautiful campsite. The lighter was put to the wood and then we finally got............... A flame! Hooray, our mighty fire maker! But as soon as we got a flame, it started to drizzle a bit. The drizzle turned into a lot of rain. Good thing we had plastic table cloths! They double well as rain ponchos. The rain stopped for a bit and then it really started to come down! Grandma wasn't so sure the flame was going to stay. We tried to hold an umbrella over the flame to keep the fire going. All we wanted was to eat some hot dogs. But as soon as we removed the umbrella the rain put out our flame. Then it happened. It started to HAIL! Holy COW!! It was COLD! There was a little path that went from out campsite back to our cars, that turned from a path into a mini river. We ran for the cars! Uncle A posed for a picture in the hail. Poor Little Cowpoke was screaming next to the car because all he had was a blanket to cover his head. I was holding Cowpokette and an umbrella and my SLR, while trying not to slip and slide on the river. So, my picture of Uncle A in the hail storm was a bit blurry. But you can see the rain and hail bouncing off the cars!! Grandma finally got back in the car. We were all soaked and hungry. We headed back home and cooked our hot dogs on the George Foreman Grill and cooked our smores in the microwave! They were not as wonderful as fire melted smores, but they were pretty close. They were still sticky, gooey, and wonderful! Cowpokette just laughed at hers. And she freaked out when I tried to eat it. She just wanted to stare at it. My sister was happy to be home and dry. And the smores do help too!! Even Little Cowpoke enjoyed the microwave smores. We decided to try our hot dog roast the next weekend. Maybe it would warm up a tad!! In the end we all had a really fun time and we all laugh about our hot dog roast in the hail storm.