Natural highs

Any person who doesn't like this time of year isn't a person at all. I just love it so much.

Elementary schools recently celebrated Red Ribbon Week, and I can remember singing or hearing "Go for a Natural High" every October. To be truthful, I didn't really get it then. But I do now. To me, there is nothing more exhilarating than a trail run on an autumn evening. Who needs any mind-altering substances that are harmful when you can be thrilled and healthy at the same time?

I'm trying to get better at steep trails. This is the Woodbriar Trail, which is very steep (but short), even though the picture doesn't show it. I only took one brief rest on it when I went on Thursday this week, so I'm getting better.

This week I went on a hike with some casual friends to Adams Canyon in Layton. I had two objectives in going on this hike: overcome my social awkwardness and see a new place in my home county. While I don't think I did the former, I was happy to do the latter. I thought about running it, but that would defeat the purpose of a group hike. I felt a little impatient just hiking at first, but later up the trail it would not have been a good running trail. It reminded me of Holbrook Canyon, but it was less confusing and had fewer creek crossings.

 It was a pleasant hike, but towards the end there was a bit of scrambling and steepness. It was getting late, but we decided to continue to the waterfall. I'm glad we did. Before the waterfall, I was less than enthused--not that it was bad, just not worth it for me. But the waterfall at the end was lovely. It was fun to be out in the twilight in an open space by running water. It was worth it. It was 1.9 miles to the falls.

 Then we had to continue our hike down in the dark. What did people do before cellphones with bright flashlights on them?

Then I went to North Canyon again for the third Saturday in a row, because I love it so much. There were more cars than usual on the dirt road, probably because of hunting season. There was an appropriately Halloweeny sight. I didn't see it last week, but maybe I just didn't notice it, because at first I thought it was firewood:

 There were even some hooves and a bone strewn about:

But that still didn't detract from the beauty of my favorite place in Bountiful, although many of the leaves are already gone.

In other news--not to be prideful, but I'm basically as righteous as they come. I'm definitely not perfect, but I'm very much a Peter Priesthood type. Thus it might be surprising that I bought an explicit album this week. You may or may not know that I love Lady Gaga. Maybe there's some psychological thing accounting for a quiet guy like me liking a bombastic popstar, but mostly I just think she's a fantastic singer. I had gone to Amazon and was picking individual clean songs from the clean version of her new album, Joanne. But then I found that I could get the entire explicit album for less than picking the individual songs, so I did that. I wasn't planning on listening to the explicit songs anyway, but after my bishop's wife gave a stake conference talk about media today, I deleted them from my computer--although they're still floating around my Amazon Cloud Player and Google Play.

However, while I don't condone the inappropriate songs, this album is cleaner than her last solo album (the Tony Bennett collaboration was squeaky clean), and the music industry is inconsistent in what it calls "explicit." If this were set to the same standards as Ariana Grande's last album, this would not be explicit. And this one is no worse than many a country album, and they never get an explicit label tacked on. 

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Rest assured, I have remained within (or under) my calorie budget during all this pumpkinundation roundup. But I haven't been eating as many vegetables as I should.

 These Twizzlers Caramel Apple Filled Twists have a fake apple flavor with a fake caramel filling. I don't know how to describe the filling; it seemed like caramel mixed with flour. But that's not out of place, because Twizzlers are made with flour. They weren't bad. 3.5/5.

 I had a bite of this Corner Bakery pumpkin gingerbread bundt cake last year, but I had a whole one this year (ate it on two different days). It was tasty and pumpkiny. 4/5.

 These Hershey's Caramel Apple Filled Milk Chocolates have a fake apple flavor with authentic chocolate and caramel. It's an odd combination, but it works. 4/5.

 These Keebler Pumpkin Spice Fudge Stripes Cookies were one of the first pumpkin items I saw in August, but I just got them this week. They're a little bland. They're more like ginger snaps than anything else. They aren't made with real pumpkin. 3.5/5.

 It was harder than you'd expect to get a picture of the Farr's Fresh Pumpkin Pie and Cheesecake Twist ice cream with the signs. I got the pumpkin one several weeks ago, but this time I twisted it with the cheesecake. I put Boo Berry cereal on it, not because the flavors match, but because I only get Boo Berry once a year. The ice cream flavors aren't super flavorful, but they're still good. 4/5.

 My work had a pie social, and I don't know whether this pumpkin pie was homemade or storebought. Someone at my table said it's hard to mess up pumpkin pie; I said this one was slightly inferior to most, but I think that's because it was overcooked. 4/5.

 Do you like my sexy leg pics in this series? One of my favorite things has been to include pumpkin items from obscure places, and this My Cookie Fix pumpkin spice cookie came from the gas station at the bottom of our hill (Miller's, formerly Walker's). It was a lightly pumpkiny sugar cookie with a cream cheese-esque frosting. 4/5.

 I got this Nielsen's Frozen Custard pumpkin concrete on the same day as the cookie, the pie, and the ice cream, so I could only eat one-fourth of it that night. If I hadn't gone running I would have had no calories. It's good enough, but no better than ice cream. But it has fewer calories, so it's better in that regard. 4/5.

 I chose this Kneaders nut-covered caramel apple over a small pumpkin chocolate chip cake, because (1) I can't have caramel apples after Halloween, but I can have pumpkin through Thanksgiving, and (2) at least the apple provided nutrients. It's generally hard to go wrong with a caramel apple. 5/5.

 I'm a little surprised they still make the Hershey's Candy Corn bars in full-sized bars, because they're not that great. But I always appreciate a seasonal item. 3/5.

 Arctic Circle pumpkin pie shakes have been a staple of Halloween and Thanksgiving for me since at least 2003. But I think other restaurants do it better, because Arctic Circle can get a little spicy. 4.5/5.

Only from running eight miles on a mountain was I able to also have this Baskin-Robbins pumpkin cheesecake ice cream. It didn't seem terribly pumpkiny or cheesecakey, though it was good. Their plain pumpkin pie ice cream has more of an autumnal flavor. 4.5/5.