Doughnut Falls and a Missing Tooth

Sad to say I wasn't greatly impressed by it which is kind of funny considering what happened... It is a very short, 1.4 mile hike to the falls. While I was hiking along the cliff on the right side of this falls, a climber up above started sending down about fist size rocks without knowing it. Joe Meservy, and Savannah Woods were just ahead of me, as you will see in one of the pictures here. They heard it first and yelled up at him to get his attention. I joined them, making a sign to tell him to cut it out. This all happened in a matter of 15 seconds from the time the rocks started falling. A couple seconds after I stared making the sign, I saw a rock fly toward me and it hit me in the mouth, but only there. I was very, very lucky to not have been hit in the head or any part of my face besides my teeth. The force of the rock, as it turned out, shattered one tooth to the bone, which caused me to have to have it removed, loosened one, and put slight hairline fractures in another. It didn't hurt that bad, actually. Right after it happened, I knew I just needed to get out of there. I could feel the shattered tooth in my mouth, but the tooth was still attached some how so it didn't look so bad. It just looked like it was chipped on top and cracked in the middle (see picture below). Luckily, two of my guy friends were there to give me a blessing once we got back to the parking lot. It was a short trail, so it didn't take long to get back to the car.

Once we got out of the canyon, Joe made some phone calls to get a hold of his brother-in-law's brother who is a dentist. He got a hold of him and the dentist was willing to leave a youth conference to come to look at my teeth and help anyway he could. I don't have insurance, so that was a great blessing to have him willing to do that for me. Savannah took some pictures so that I could see what it looked like before we went the dentist. She took some while we were there, too.

The dentist at first said that he would try to glue the cracked tooth together and put a covering on it until a later day when he could look at it more and see what to do. Once he took a better look at it, he realized that the crack went at a diagonal all the way down to the bone. The crack basically cracked the tooth in half down the middle so from the front you couldn't see the damage. When it pulled the top of the tooth off, you could see the part in the front that made it look like it was only a small crack and then the rest of it is the back of my tooth that went all the way down to the bone. You can see what it looked like in the picture below. Once he got that out, he said something that told  me that it was worse than he thought. It was shattered and it would have to be removed. So, he numbed me more and started removing it, but because it was fractured so much, whenever he pulled on part of it, it would just break off. One time it really broke loudly and that is what finally sent me into shock. I hadn't been in shock or anything until that point. It took a long time for him to get the root out, but that is what is pictured in the other picture of the tooth. I tried connecting them, but they don't connect. That just tells you how shattered it was.

The doctor said that the tooth that is loose should be fine and heal. The other tooth that has some small hairline fractures should be fine as well as long as I don't hit it so hard again. It would take another blow like the one I got this one to do anything to it. It is the strongest tooth in the mouth.

On Wednesday I have an appointment to get a flipper retainer that has a fake tooth on it. I can't really chew or suck on anything right now, so that limits what I can eat. But my friends and roommates are taking care of me, so I should be fine. I'm just glad I have a couple weeks to heal before going to Nauvoo. I am also really glad it was a bottom tooth and not a top tooth.

Picture taken exactly 19 seconds before it happened. The rocks came down from the right side about 100 feet above.

I have a bloody picture of this, but I'm sure you appreciate the cleaned up one.

 Big part at top of tooth is part of tooth that was above the crack you see in the picture above. The rest that goes down is the back of the tooth. Below is the root of the tooth.

On the bright side, I earlier that week I went to visit my friend Chandra Hoyt and her kids for a day and went to the Manti Pageant with friends in the ward.

Adams Canyon

On Memorial Day, eight friends and I hiked Adams Canyon. It is a beautiful hike with a beautiful waterfall at the end. Most of the hike was by the stream with beautiful small cascades every once in a while. There was one point where I thought we had reached the end because it was a good sized waterfall, but we still had quite a bit of a way to go. It was tiring, but worth it!

This is how we had to cross the river. I didn't bother with the rocks. I just walked right through it. :)

Here we climbed on the left side of the waterfall to get as high above the falls as we could. This was challenging, but really fun!

It's hard to tell, but I'm right on the edge of the cliff above the falls. Two of my friends went even higher up and around the falls, but that was incredibly scary and dangerous, so I didn't do it.

Get-A-Way to St. George

My brother Steven has an ingenious idea of meeting each other half way between CA and UT to have some fun together. Although Mesquite is actually the halfway point, we met in St. George and had a blast! I had no idea there was church history related things there! We toured Brigham Young's winter home, which I didn't even know he had. We also went to the tabernacle and around the temple. For fun, we went to a dinosaur tracks museum and to a day spa for pedicures. Of course, we also ate at In-N-Out together. Here are some pictures to prove it!