I’m not all that outdoorsy but my kids are, so we spent a couple long weekends camping this summer. We got horribly bitten when we forgot to pack inset repellent, but we also saw beautiful scenery and, in August, a ton of shooting stars. I was looking through the pictures and thought I’d share a few. (Not of the stars, though. My camera’s not that good.)

We spent a weekend at Flaming Gorge swimming and watching beautiful sunsets while the kids chased rabbits and hunted for bird skulls.

On the way back we spent a few minutes at a tiny roadside cemetery, so small there’s no office and no online info about it either. But people clearly still visit and decorate quite often. There were a lot of crumbling headstones, though. It was a bit sad–the ones we could read were from the late 1960s and early 70s, so not that old, and some of them were almost completely crumbled away. I think they were concrete, which would be a cheap* but terrible choice for the temperature range around here. We go from the snowy low teens in winter to the high 90s every summer (about -9 to 35 in Celsius), and that’ll crack concrete like an egg.

For the Perseids, we went way down past Escalante and up a dirt road onto a mountain covered in aspens, right into bear country. We didn’t actually see any bears, though there were tracks and scat near our campsite. We saw plenty of deer, though, some right outside our tent. And cows, for some reason. So many cows wandering around on that mountain. Sadly, this trip has the worst pictures because my camera died early on. I’m a bad camper and a bad photographer. Meh.

*I’m not saying the families who bought them were cheapskates. I’m saying headstones are a racket and whoever sold them concrete sucks.