in the dell

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we had intended to ski this past Sunday - I even picked up the Alta tickets and everything.  But when the alarm went off Sunday morning, the valley was socked in with clouds, and the weather report was promising cloudy or mostly cloudy all day, and Alta reported only 1 new inch of snow.  And so, being the newly-minted snow snobs that we are, we got up and went to breakfast at the Cottonwood Cafe.

After breakfast, we found our way to Dimple Dell Regional Nature Park, an urban wilderness area of 640+ acres smack dab in the middle of Sandy, Utah.  What a great place!  Someone with great forethought preserved all this land surrounding a creek bed that flows out of Little Cottonwood Canyon and set it aside for walkers, runners, mountain bikers and horseback riders.  There are innumerable trails, some woodchipped and wide, others narrow and winding and possibly for animals.  The creek at the bottom of the ravine is dry now but I suspect it cranks in the springtime.  The banks of the creek are lined with tall trees while scrub oak and sagebrush cover the dell walls.

We walked for over an hour - long enough for the clouds to clear off over the valley, although they seemed to be staying put in the canyons - and only saw a few of people, including a couple of horseback riders from a distance.  There was a fair amount of bird action since the weather was mild: a red-tailed hawk, lots of bluejays and big fat robins, and we surprised some sort of partridge.  We managed to do a loop, walking out along the creek and back along the rim, peeking into the backyards of the folks lucky enough (and rich enough) to have homes backing up to the dell.  It's a lovely place, and a real oasis in the middle of all the valley's development.