Exploring Northern Utah: Stewart Falls, Mexican Food, & Trying Dirty Soda in Salt Lake City!

Really scared me. Oh that scared me. Yeah. Wow. What a crazy way to start the morning. What a great way to start. I can see why people are into this. This is really good. In our last couple vlogs we were in New Mexico. We've made our way northwest to the Salt Lake City area for the weekend. We've driven through Salt Lake City a few times in the past but we've never had the time to stop and fully explore so we are super pumped to be back here. So today's And we kicked off our morning with a sunrise hike to Stewart Falls which let's just say started pretty interesting. Oh my gosh we just started this hike and it's kind of dark out and there's a moose in front of us. Our first time ever seeing a moose and we're just backing up. Nothing to see here Mr. Moose. Oh my god I'm shaking. That scared me so bad. He's just staring at us. I don't know what to do. We're just kind of stuck here. We don't really know what to do. He hasn't moved. We've been here probably about five minutes and we just I guess I feel like if I clap he'll move but I kind of feel bad at the same time. But then we have to wonder where we'll find him again on the trail. Yeah he's moving now. But now I'm kind of nervous to do this hike. Yeah he's moving. Just go somewhere far away buddy. Yeah. I scared Adam because I I saw him yeah when she first did it I was like what is it a bear or something really scared me. Oh that scared me. Yeah. Wow what a crazy way to start the morning. Great way to start. Okay now that that's out of the way we can get this hike started. So we're hiking to a waterfall called Stewart Falls near the Salt Lake City area. It's about 3.6 miles round trip I think and 646 feet of elevation gain so compared to last weekend's hike it is a lot easier. A lot of the hikes we wanted to do in the area are not dog friendly and that's kind of a bummer but we came across this hike but we hear that it gets really busy so we started really early to avoid the crowds. Hence our moose friend. And now we just saw four elk. Three adult elks and a baby elk. They were either elk or white-tailed deer because they had a white patch on their butt. Yeah but they're really big. Yeah I've read a lot of reviews on this hike and I didn't see anyone mention seeing wildlife maybe because we're here so early but wow the baby's still staring at us. Let's hope the mama's not ahead on the trail like waiting to to get us. We're here. Don't get us. We're making noises. We come in peace. We don't want to leave in pieces. We made it to the top of the falls. It's a 200 foot waterfall and it's kind of a tiered waterfall so the top part is kind of more of like a veil and it's like a thinner flow of water and the bottom part which we'll go to next is more of a thick gushing waterfall that you think of when you think of a waterfall. That was probably one of my favorite waterfalls we've seen in a really long time. We got lucky because there are only two other people there because we started at sunrise but we have a feeling it's going to be a bit busier going back up so we have our masks ready to go or as Adam likes to call them our face underwear. Unlike some trails where you go up to get to the end and then down the whole way back this one's a mix of up and down both ways so right now we're on the up part of going back but then it should get really easy. We just got back from our hike. It took us about two-ish hours to get there hang out a little bit at the waterfall and make our way back. Definitely start as early as you can. We didn't see hardly any people maybe five or six groups but the best benefit was like the sunrise light hitting the mountains hitting the hills going through the trees hitting the waterfall there was a rainbow in the waterfall it was just awesome and you also might get to catch some moose and so maybe some mule deer some other like crazy animals. Yeah it was amazing. So one thing we forgot to mention about this hike is that it's on the Alpine Loop Scenic Byway which is this really popular drive here in Utah especially in the fall but from what we've seen so far it looks beautiful year-round and to access this hike as well as road you have to pay six dollars at this like little toll booth right before you get to the trailhead. But if you have one of these guys that we always like to harp about the America the Beautiful Pass you're covered you're paid for. Oh it's fall free! So our plan for the next couple hours or so is to just drive around the Alpine Loop Scenic Byway and see what we can see. We aren't sure if it's one of those drives where they have like pull-offs where you can get out and actually like see stuff closer or if you just see stuff from the car. We have really no idea what to expect we couldn't find much information online except for that it was beautiful so we're just gonna drive and see what happens. This road is it's awesome but it's it's kind of scary because it's really tight it's kind of like one and a half lanes it's really windy and so when you're passing cars it's really tight there's no there's tons of drop-offs there's no like guard rails nothing not too many cars we've mostly seen bicyclists and some of them are coming down the hill pretty quick and they get on you pretty quickly and before you can even be ready to get out of their way but it's awesome so far. We went a little off road for that one that one was kind of close. All right we just emerged out of the other side of the Alpine Loop Scenic Drive and man it was awesome there's tons of spots to pull off and get your photos we shot the drone up a times absolutely beautiful I'd say it's probably best to go earlier the better because as we were coming out there was lots of cars coming in but man I can't even imagine how beautiful it would be in the fall when all the aspen trees are like golden and yellow it would be sick. One thing that we love about the Salt Lake area is that there's just mountains everywhere you go to the grocery store and you walk out and it's like bam mountains and we keep joking because we saw Home Depot that had a mountain view we kept joking that if that had been our Home Depot during our van build we may have enjoyed those Home Depot trips a little bit more but we are back on the road and we are headed to Salt Lake City next for a few little food adventures. So when you think of Salt Lake City you probably don't think of Mexican food as being like the local cuisine but when we were researching things to do in the area we came across a spot called Red Iguana over and over and over again our boy Guy Fieri's even been here and we like going to Triple D restaurants so we figured we had to give it a try we typically don't have to twist our arm when it comes to Mexican food so we just got ourselves some takeout. We heard that this place had a really great mole and they have at least six different types so we knew we had to get something with mole on it so these are the enchiladas suizas so according to the menu it says it's not your typical or your traditional suiza so it's two corn tortillas filled with sour cream chicken i'm cheating by the way and avocado topped with mole poblano finished with melted jack cheese and a dollop of sour cream oh yeah and y'all know we love tacos it's been a while since we've had some so we had to get their tacos don ramon which we had heard were really good also gonna cheat because there's a lot of ingredients so these are three grilled corn tortillas and they actually are a little crisp like crunchy they look really really good and they have tender top sirloin tips grilled with pork chorizo garnished with shredded lettuce and queso cotija i always want to say cojita that's not right and it has pico and then this really good looking green salsa oof i love green salsa they also gave us the tiniest little bag of chips i think we would have really liked like seven times this amount and then some really good looking salsa so we might have to go get more chips somewhere else so we can finish this salsa this looks and smells delicious i'm gonna read you the ingredients sorry cheating again puebla's beloved mole guajillo and ancho dried chilies peanuts sesame seeds walnuts raisins bananas and mexican chocolate the raisins and bananas kind of threw us off a little bit it's kind of like an interesting twist we knew that mole had like tons of differencing different ingredients in it but bananas and uh raisins uh and didn't see that one coming that looks good oh this is so like hearty looking that's a lot of flavor this uh yeah you can like really taste all those like different the bananas kind of i mean it's it's kind of sweet it's kind of like smoky almost i don't know it's it's an interesting flavor because it's just so different i smell something familiar but i don't know what it is that is a very interesting flavor yeah i don't know how to describe it it's not super overpowering the enchiladas as a whole are super super creamy yeah i mean there's so many ingredients in there and we don't know all of them it's really hard to pick them out but this is good it's hard to describe all right catherine gave me the honor of trying the tacos first let's get a little that sauce on there oh dude these look so good oh wow yeah so this meat in here is nice and soft but has tons of flavor all kinds of seasonings on it the cheese is good the lettuce is great and the tortillas is super bomb too that you said they're fried it says grilled pan pan like in a grilled yeah they're grilled but they seem kind of crunchy i don't know you can see like yeah you can see the juice down there they're not as crunchy as maybe if you got it in the restaurant because it's been sitting for a couple minutes but still you can hear a little crunch on the tortillas there the steak or the tips or whatever sirloin tips are super soft that's always a concern getting steak tacos is i'm always afraid it's going to be really really chewy but this is amazing and i guess there's chorizo in there somewhere i don't really know but the flavor is incredible these are so good i like that there's a little bit of a crunch this side's gotten a little soggy from sitting kind of in the juices but this side's still really crunchy and yeah that green sauce the red iguana has been devoured now we are off to get a salt lake city sweet treat so we're normally not soda drinkers except for that time we went to the world of coca-cola in atlanta and tried sodas from all over the world i don't like that one but we heard about this popular thing here in salt lake city called dirty soda and we knew we had to give it a try if you don't know what a dirty soda is it's a whatever kind of soda you want they put a fruit puree in there i can't say puree today fruit puree that's a hard one or uh like a cream stuff like that some kind of flavoring yeah and they mix it all together yeah and there's so many possibilities there are quite a few chains in the salt lake area that have these or maybe around utah as well but we came to this spot called thirst because it had really good reviews people said it tasted better than the others if any of y'all are from salt lake definitely let us know below what your favorite soda shop is and their uh combos are endless like you can pick whatever soda you want that they have then there's the uh all the syrups and all the flavorings there's probably a number to it but it's in the thousands of the combinations you can make obviously so so you first pick your size which we'd like to point out that these are the kids sizes 16 ounce this is a regular drink this is a lot of soda yeah the kids size so we got the you pick how much ice you want so we got light ice because we've learned at starbucks pro tip if you get light ice with your iced coffee you get more coffee so you're getting more for your money so we wanted to get as much sugary caffeinated goodness as we could get as much sugar for bang for our book sugar bang for our book and then they have like pre-determined combinations which we'll explain what we got in a second or you can build your own yeah so what i got was the you're killing me smalls and so that's a uh bark's root beer with toasted marshmallow syrup and vanilla cream uh just sounds like a dream made in heaven a flavor made in heaven so oh dude that's root beer it's like a root beer float basically that's so good and that's that's an unbeatable combo yours is i don't i don't even want to try yours now just kidding and i got the dr mc creamy and the names at thirst are just amazing it was hard to pick we're like do we want the one with a fun name or one that we actually think we'd like and so what the dr mc creamy is is it's dr pepper with raspberry puree and then a coconut cream and i'd say dr pepper and root beer are my two favorite sodas if i were to drink a soda that's what i'd pick so i'm super excited to have a dr pepper one and then i love coconut anything so this should be good and you can see a little bit in here like the raspberry puree which is awesome oh my god that's it went up my nose a little you ever drink from a straw before i got too excited oh my god that it's so good it doesn't even really taste like soda it just tastes like a sugary drink it's really good they're super sweet i i don't know we say we don't really drink soda but i can see why people are into this this is really good we're trading now pretty excited for this this is good but i think mine's better yeah this is a you know the fruity element i like the fruit i don't know i like mine but this tastes this one tastes less like a dr pepper or like a soda to me just like a sugary drink and this one tastes a lot more like root beer when it's actually what it actually has in it but they're both very good but i'm gonna go with mc creamy on this one i like the ice though it's um nice and small i don't know if you've ever been to sonic it's kind of like that but it looks even better than sonic it's i don't know this looks good it's they're both really good they're both good we almost forgot that we got something else too another sugary treat and when we were researching dirty soda or just soda shops in the salt lake area we kept coming across every single one has these like those classic sugar cookies like the soft sugar cookies with the pink frosting on top those were at least my jam growing up from heb i think they're sold everywhere but like the really soft sugar cookies but we decided to get something different than that because this really spoke to adam yeah you want to try this we try to get it out without making a mess yeah don't lose all the topping on it so that's a scotcheroo is what they call it and i have it pulled up here uh so let's see chocolate butterscotch dessert bar chocolate butterscotch peanut butter with rice krispies i guess is like the base of it dude that sounds so good they had other really good looking treats besides the sugar cookies and this that this like orange roll i think it was a cinnamon roll with like orange frosting i think yeah adam was really adam cinnamon roll but i don't know you can't pass this thing up so uh down the hatch here comes the tree dude is it good it's like chocolate peanut butter on top i don't know if i can technically eat this but yolo amazing dude that is so good i don't i never had one or heard of one and man why are these not more wide known we need a thirst in our van i can see why people are addicted to these kind of things this is so good we're gonna have like the ultimate sugar high the rest of the day just wash it down with more sugar don't judge me but i ate all but two bites of that i don't know that thing was so good but my stomach kind of hurts but that might be my new favorite dessert that was i can't get over that was so good we made it to antelope island which i guess is an island but if you look at it on google maps it looks like a peninsula on the great salt lake which is where we're calling home for tonight and look at the view we ended up booking a campsite here for the night because tomorrow we have a very early morning adventure which is where our next vlog will begin adam's trying to clean the windshield so we can get some driving shots without you guys seeing all of our bug guts freezer 2020 free tacos and ice cream for everyone for you for you for you you get an ice cream you get a taco everyone gets a taco