Wildflowers and pockets

While autumn might be my favorite time of year for, well, everything, May has got to be the second best time of the year for trail running. You get the late daylight of summer without the hot temperatures. There's a profound fragrance in the air. And, of course, there's an overabundance of wildflowers. Sure, you get Richardson's geranium, common sunflowers, and chicory flowers later in the summer, but not as many all at once. I bought a second Utah wildflower identification book this week, so that if one book doesn't help me, I can look in the other.

Sometimes I feel like a broken record talking about this all the time, but I had to go up to North Canyon again. I hadn't been up since November. Maybe I should have waited a little longer to let all the snow melt, but I don't necessarily regret it. And I saw the father of my childhood friend on the trail. I took my phone with me to take pictures of scenery and in case something happened to me.

The bigger flower in the middle is a yellowbell. The others are Nuttall violets, which I hadn't seen before, but I recognized them from my books.

There was a lot of snow still on the trail up at the top.

Last November, I saw this little baby shoe (aww!). And six months later, it was still there (though it has shifted to different signs).

I believe these purple flowers are western waterleaf. They were all over the bottom of the trail, and combined with lots of dandelions, it was beautiful.

Arrowleaf balsamroot is one of the most spectacular wildflowers, partly because they are huge, but mostly because they form colonies all up the hillsides. This is on a side trail. I was pretty exhausted at this point because I had already run up the canyon and then back down. I just wasn't ready stop yet.

Longleaf phlox captivated me before I even cared about wildflowers.

I usually take my phone with me up the canyons, and I don't have any problems. But yesterday, my phone decided to throw a party in my pocket.

The first strange thing I noticed was when I got to Rudy's Flat, I stopped to look around, and I could hear some music. I wondered if some hikers had brought a guitar up. But nope, my phone was playing music without me asking it to--and it wasn't even the playlist I had most recently been listening to!

Near the end of my run, I stopped to take a picture of western waterleaf and noticed I was calling someone by mistake. Whoops.

Then when I got home, I noticed even more things. I had started drafting a text message to someone else that said this:
2111th, 11a÷×AwqaqQ@`

Thankfully, I didn't send it!

Then I looked at my pictures, and there were lots of pictures I remembered taking, but also some that I didn't remember. Like this one:

 And this one:

And not only did I take those "pictures," I even took a 23-second video. All without knowing it.