Old Ephraim Mountain Man Rendezvous

Each Memorial Day weekend, the Old Ephraim Mountain Man Rendezvous is held in Blacksmith Fork Canyon. After missing it for several years, we finally were able to attend it and went with our friends, the Buchert family.

There were many participants, dressed in "authentic" clothing of the time period and living out of their tents and tepees for the weekend.

This man demonstrated how to start a fire using flint, steel and charcloth.

The dads and boys watched the black powder rifle shooting. This was much too noisy and scary for the 2-year-old girls, so we had to take them away.

Here is a blacksmith making iron products to trade.

Some of the trading posts had nice animal skulls for sale.

Daffodil and Ian tried on skunkskin caps.

Erin liked the turtle shells.

All in all we had an enjoyable time, but we were a bit disappointed that there were not activities in which all visitors could participate. The advertisement had led us to believe that anyone could try out archery, rifle shooting, tomahawk throwing, etc., but one could only do these activities if he had brought his own equipment. (And we don't happen to have extra tomahawks lying around...)

And now, yet another Natural History Moment:

While returning the remains of our picnic lunch to the car, Kevin and Erin found a yellow-bellied racer. Kevin managed to catch it without dumping Erin out of the child backpack. He bagged it (yes, we keep herp bags in the back of the car for moments like these) and brought it back to the rendezvous to show everyone else. Megan, Ian, and Soren all wanted to hold the snake. After admiring it and photographing it, we released it away from the crowds.