Four Wheels, Some Mountains, and LOTS of Dust!

We have had a great adventure this past week, albeit a rather dusty one!  Our wonderful friends who we celebrated the Fourth with, invited us to ride four wheelers with them through the mountains.  This is something we've wanted to do for quite some time, but never had the four-wheelers to do it with.

 

 Our friends on their four-wheeler.... 

My dad and our son on the Gator...

My husband and I on the other four-wheeler...

All of us ready to head out on our adventure for the day!

And off we went.  Because the four-wheelers are licensed vehicles to drive on county roads, we drove on several county roads before we turned off onto the road... or should I say path that took us through the mountains.

Some views of the mountains and valleys we traveled through...

I'm not sure what I was trying to capture in the above picture, but I was riding on the four-wheeler, and snapping pictures, so the camera was being bounced around quite a bit... lol!

It was a beautiful day to be riding through the mountains, with beautiful views in every direction.  My camera simply could not capture the beauty of the views around us.

The road was a very good gravel road that you could traverse in a truck, if you were so inclined, but I have to say that traveling it in a four-wheeler added a whole lot more excitement than simply riding in a vehicle!

 We stopped for a break beside a creek that had been dammed up to create a little pool of water.

 

The boys saw it as an opportunity to splash some water on their dusty faces... 

 

 

I preferred to stay dry myself... but it was a lovely little pool that someone had put a lot of work into, and a great excuse to get off the four-wheelers and stretch our legs for a few minutes.

I believe the mountain in the far distance in the above picture is called Baldy Mountain, but I could stand to be corrected....

Regardless of what the correct name of the mountain is, it was impressive, and beautiful.

We continued on down the trail towards Sandpoint.  The Schweitzer mountains could be seen off in the distance.

We ate a LOT of dust on this trip!  The roads were quite dry and dusty, which meant we had to keep a fair distance between each four wheeler in order to even see the road!

We arrived in Sandpoint, and drove through town, looking for a restaurant we could pull into to get a bite to eat. 

All of us decided a burger sounded great, so we found a great little burger joint in Sandpoint, called Serv-A-Burger.  It was excellent.  It was a first time for us to eat there, as well as our friends, and we were all impressed with the quality of the food.  We enjoyed a wonderful meal there, before heading back across the mountain.  This time we went a different way home, and it was a little quicker. 

Driving through Sandpoint, the views of the mountains are incredible in every direction. 

We headed back up the same dusty roads we had taken before, but took a different turn than we did coming, which was a faster route back to the house.

The dust was pretty wild! Lots and lots of it!  I kept my camera tucked under my shirt to help keep the dust off of it.  But...  that dust got everywhere! 

It was around 5 p.m. or so when we arrived back at the house, and we had a welcome drink of some awesome sun tea made by Patty just before we left, and it was perfect for us when we arrived back from the hot dusty trail ride!  The sun tea was a sweet ending to an amazing day!  Riding four wheelers through the mountains is certainly high on our list of fun things to do!  We are already looking forward to another ride soon.  After the next rainstorm, I think would be perfect timing after the rain tames down the dust that comes from riding through the dirt trails!

We were hoping to catch a glimpse of some wild animals on the ride, and one deer did cross the trail in front of us, but other than that, we did not get a glimpse of any other wildlife.  No doubt they saw us coming a long way off with the trail of dust we carried with us!