Awesomely Unproductive Weekend Pt. 1 - Climbing

This last weekend was the weekend before Dead Week, a chance to prepare for a difficult week full of final projects and other stresses, but it also seemed like a great weekend to head out of town for some rock climbing and running.  Brent was good enough to drive all the way to Colorado with me for some climbing in a new area and a race (by which I mean to say, my boyfriend is awesome).  The race I was running was outside Fruita, Colorado on the Kokopelli Trail loops, but this was also stunningly close to Colorado National Monument, which is full of awesome climbing, including towers (our personal favorite).

There were some near disasters once we got to Colorado.  Camping inside the monument was really expensive and they didn't allow campfires, so we sought some cheap to free sites outside, which lead us to this very soggy dirt road.

The road became soggy slowly, subtly  until we were sliding around in this quagmire.  

Brent and Phyllis handled it all like champs though. 

And I laughed and took pictures.  

Once we escaped that trap, we sought some other sites at higher elevations, which were far too cold.  Looking for these sites lead us to discover that my mud-covered, off-balance tires lead poor Phyllis (my Forester) to start shaking violently once we reached 40 miles an hour.  So I cried (I've taken my car, which I carefully selected and paid more than I wanted to for in hopes that it would last for a long time and I've taken it into the shop every six months for serious fixes and I always make bad car decisions and I have the worst luck as a car owner....).  Anyways, we decided to camp in a BLM parking lot that had a fire pit nearby and just sleep in the car.  This all worked remarkably well.  The fire sure tried to provide warm, but I think the cold, soggy ground took most of the heat; however, sleeping in the car was pretty dang warm, even if our sleeping fogged the windows up pretty severely.

The next day we decided to climb Otto's Route on Independence Monument.  Colorado National Monument was set aside as by President Taft in 1911 "for extraordinary examples of erosion."  No joke, you can read about it here.  One of these extraordinary examples in Independence Monument, a 450 foot monolith that stands separate from the sandstone walls around it, a result of the different rates of erosion between the layers of sandstone types that form the cliffs here.  The tower is made of Wingate sandstone, which is my favorite type of sandstone.

Independence Monument and Monument Canyon

Me and tower

Brent and tower.  

John Otto was the first Monument Superindendent, and he was awesome, he scaled as many monoliths as possible so he could plant American flags at all the high points.  He also surveyed in roads and trails to encourage everyone to visit the monument.  The road through the monument is pretty rad, but Otto's Route is far cooler.  In 1911, when the tower was first ascended, there weren't dynamic ropes, climbing shoes, or camming devices.  Instead, Otto and his climbing partners actually drilled pipes into the wall so they could get up.  The pipes are no longer there, but the holes they drilled are, and they make awesome hand holds.

My right hand is in one of the drilled holes.  Amazing hand holds.  

The hike in, while long (we're climbers, not mountaineers), was nice.  We got to see baby big horn sheep, which was first for me.  I've decided big horn sheep are my spirit animal, I would like to be able to jump from ledge to ledge as gracefully as they do, like its no sweat (literally and metaphorically).

Look closely, the big horn sheep are the things that aren't rocks or plants.  We almost walked right past them.  

The long hike was a good opportunity to take more pictures with the tower, look how big it is compared to me.  

Otto's Route is rated as a 5.8/5.9 climb, which is pretty low grade for such a tall tower.  It's also right in my range, and Brent encouraged me to lead this whole route.  I was nervous and tired, but it was awesome!  The first two pitches were mostly scrambling with a little chimney climbing (which was new for me on lead).  But the third pitch was downright difficult for me.  There was an off-width slightly overhung section that I would normally have backed down from, but my recent streak of confident climbing, Brent's encouragement, and those awesome drilled holds helped me through that pitch, after which I celebrated and had Brent take my picture.  

The perfectly round holes in the lower half of the picture are the drilled holds that make this section managable.  

Pitch 4 and 5 were pretty frightening.  The climbing was generally quite easily, but relied a lot of drilled holds, that I couldn't protect with a cam or chock (translation: I climbed for longer than I'd like without any gear to protect a fall, because there were no places to put such gear).

Run-out section that can't be protected, but the carved holds and steps make it do-able.  

 The top of the final pitch was the most technically challenging  because it is overhung and climbing over shelves like that is difficult.  However, there were hand holds drilled at the best places, and I finished.

 

And there was much celebration.

Then we climbed up to the very top of the tower and took many celebratory pictures.

 

You often find small potholes like this on top of cliffs, or on top of large towers like this.  They're pretty cool.  

The views on-route were amazing.  

Of course, after all that climbing, we had to rappel down.  It's tiring, but must be done (because the tops of towers are too windy to be comfortable camping places).  I spent the rest of the evening smiling and thanking Brent for encouraging me to step outside my comfort zone and climb this whole tower.

We camped that night in a completely different area, the North Desert Trail Area is lots of dirt and greasewood.  And it smells funny.  But it was nice to have a place to relax and prep for the next day of adventure.

Awesomely Unproductive Weekend Pt. 2 - Running

Part Two of my Awesomely Unproductive Weekend involved a trail half-marathon, and it was amazing!  In January I saw an email for a Desert R.A.T.S. trail running festival in Fruita, CO and thought, "That's sounds excellent."  I enjoy the little bit of trail running I've done, I've heard good things about Fruita, and I'm partial to the term Desert Rats.  Altogether, this race seemed like an excellent idea, even if the timing coincided with the crunch-time part of my semester.

Ed Abbey wrote about the desert rat in his book Cactus Country, here are a few of the descriptions he included in the essay "What is  Desert Rat?"

Your desert rat is basically just another poor bare forked featherless biped, like the rest of us, but he has certain distinguishing features: a permanent squint, a hide well pricked with cactus acupunctures, the big toes all purple and dead from kicking stones, and inside the skull hardly any viable brains left.
The desert rat loves water but prefers to live, like his four-footed cousin the kangaroo rat, where water is rare as uranium.  The rarity makes it precious, therefore lovable.  For this rat the finest of all music is the tinkle of seep water trickling into a tin cup, the periodic drip of unseen waterdrops falling in the shadows upon tympanic stone.
He doesn't mind a landscape composed mostly of naked rock with some scrubby-looking plants creeping cautiously out of the cracks; in fact he tends to find green pastures and grassy lawns and trees--especially the fat sort with bushy green foliage -- stifling, even claustrophobic.  

Ah, I love Ed Abbey, such a cranky, desert-loving writer.  I highly recommend reading Desert Solitaire.  And you can read the essay I extracted the quote above from here.

Brent and I drove all the way to Fruita so I could run this race and we got up at 5:00am to make sure I got to the start line in time to pick up my race packet.  At that point, it seemed silly to go to all that work to run on a mountain bike trail.  And temperatures were in the low 30s.

Trepidation and awesome tights

 But then I started running and almost immediately lost all my reservations.  This link will take you to a description of the different trail loops they linked together for this race.  My emotions tended to change with the elevation profile below.

Marathon and half marathon elevation.  Can you believe people ran that marathon, or that some others ran that twice for the double marathon?  People can be awesome.  

1.  Bliss.  Around Mile 2 we started running on a single track bike trail through washes and then along a bluff over the Colorado River.  It was the most scenic running view ever.  I'd found a good pace (by following someone who set a good pace - a super awesome woman who had actually run the marathon the day before, that's hard core), the sun was out, and the view, THE VIEW!

2.  Lost.  While I run trails I tend to get tunnel vision, focusing on the next obstacle in my path.  And during this race, I was also following the woman in front of me.  At some point between miles 4 and 6 we (and 5 others) missed a turn and found ourselves about 300 feet below the rest of the runners.  So we all walked straight up the hill.  It was hard, and heartbreaking to realize that a few miles before I was in the front half of the crowd and now I was in the back half.  Plus we shleped up the hill the hard way only to run down hill.  And then...

3.  Trudging.  There was an aid station at mile 7 with soft chocolate chip cookies.  Best aid station ever!  The timer there actually told us, "You have a really good section of trail ahead, you'll end up back on the saddle you were on before."  I'm not sure if she was lying to us, or just looking at the bright side, it was really good that there was a trail to lead us up the mountain.  Despite the 700 foot elevation gain over 2 miles, it was still fun, in part because it always looked like we were almost to a point we could start running again.  I made up for some of my lost time here, but it was still pretty slow going.  And so hard on the joints.

4.  Elation.  The 1.5 miles of serious downhill running were the best of my entire life (no exaggeration)!  It was the kind of carefree running I've found happens rarely in adulthood.  If you've run the R-Scape trail series, it's like "The Luge" but for much longer (and a little trickier).  I couldn't wipe the silly grin off my face and was overcome with the desire to sing.  At one point, despite not wanting to antagonize the people around me, I had to sing along with the Cher that was playing on my iPod ("If I could turn back time....").  There aren't enough words in my vocabulary to accurately capture how happy I was here.

5.  Heart break.  The last 1.5 miles are back on a dirt road, and it looks like it's all up hill.  The sun was blazing, the trail was no longer interesting, and I suddenly felt tired.  Literally, I rounded the corner and said "Bummer."  The only thing that kept me running was wanting to get off that godforsaken road.  Brent was there at the end, and probably treats, and then I could stop running and tell everyone how much fun I'd had the rest of the time.

Then I finished, and Brent gave me a kiss and there was good snacks at the finish line.  I teared up a little thinking about how unhappy I'd been that last mile and how happy I was before that.
 

Then we went to get my car fixed and drove home with the excellent memories of the best half marathon ever.  The end.

Nostalgia - Friends

Prepare for a series of very nostalgic posts.  I un-earthed my scrapbooks and found lots of pictures...

A few weeks ago I got to have a Girl's Night with my oldest friends.  While our reason for assembling was not quite happy, it was a great opportunity to reminisce about all the adventures we've had.  These girls have been my friends for more than a decade.  Since we graduated high school they've all gotten married and had children (I think there's 9 kids in this group altogether), but we still maintain some contact, and that's been great.  I'm not really sure how to remember 15 years of friendship in one blog post, but here's a shot.

I met Vanessa when I was in 2nd grade, but it wasn't until 7th grade, when Candace, Trudy, and Vikki all moved to Clinton, that we all became really great friends.  Oh what a magical time, we spent most afternoons playing basketball, wandering the neighborhood, and watching awesome movies (I know I'll never forget "The Craft" and the impression it made on our group).  Some other wonderful people (including Traci, who's in several of these pictures) came into our group of friends.  I've got a pretty terrible memory, but that does confer at least one advantage: what I remember of the past (which we'll call 1997-2002) is all fun and happiness.  Then I dug out my old pictures and discovered that while we might have been having a lot of fun, we seemed to take inordinate delight in taking bad pictures of one another.  It took a lot of work to find pictures that wouldn't be labelled "embarrassing" (consisting mostly of bad, early morning faces), but here's what I came up with.

Four of us, circa 1997.  Obviously, we've been hard core from the beginning.  

Remember when photo booths were actually booths?  We were quite fond of those in the late 90s, as pictured below.

Notice people magically disappearing from the booth.  Also note our clear love of fun scissors.  

I think this illustrates one of the key parts of our group dynamic: picking on Trudy.  Trudy is one of the most delightful people I know, and one of the shortest.  In the series above you can see four of us, until the last frame when Vanessa decided to be the biggest part of the pictures.  It was hilarious.  I can't say this is the only series of pictures where Trudy disappeared from the shot.  Luckily, she's very photogenic in the pictures I have of her, and managed to be a good sport through all of this.

Dancing was a big part of our activities, and we were awesome at it:

Oh jorts.  I miss you.  

I really started developing my own musical tastes during this period.  Before then I listened to the same radio stations my parents did (and I will always and forever love Billy Joel, Chicago, and Elton John because of that), but around 12 or 13 I started being more influenced by the things my friends listened to.  We sure loved Alanis Morisette and No Doubt, but if pictures are any indication, we were also heavily influenced by the Spice Girls:

According to the caption from the scrapbook we created, this is Posh, Baby, Scary, Ginger, Sporty, and Sexy Spices.  

  Here is what we were going for:

Sleepovers were a big part of things.  Early on, we had a lot of sleepovers at Candace's, mostly because her place was awesome, but also because we might have had less supervision there.  I can now say, we totally should have been supervised more.

There are many, many more pictures from said sleepovers.  But everyone has just woken up in all of them, so I've decided to leave them boxed up.  

Occasionally we tried cooking, which is what is pictured below.  It just kills me how beautiful these girls are.  Cooking was rarely successful in these days, but they've since managed to raise their children past infancy, so I image their skills in the kitchen have improved significantly.

One of my all-time favorite memories is the time Vanessa and I tried making chocolate pudding from scratch (I'd say we were in 9th grade at the time).  It started out very promising, we simply needed to dump all the ingredients into a pot and boil for a few minutes.  However, during this short boiling period, we got distracted trying to light a gerbil cage on fire (there were no gerbils in the cage, we weren't horrible people, after all) and forgot about the pot of boiling cocoa until at least half an hour later (probably more).  By that point it had become a pot of burnt chocolate-ness, a few inches think.  The loss of promising pudding is tragic enough, but it gets worse - my mom cleaned the whole mess up.  I don't know how we got out of that.  

Lagoon was another part of growing up for us.  Whenever I get annoyed at groups of teenagers, I try to remember how obnoxious we must have been, especially at Lagoon.  One of our favorite things to do was ride the Sky Lift (just a shuttle back and forth across the park) and count how many people would say "Hi" to us if we said "hi" to them.  It was silly, and we didn't have a great success rate.  We also used to try riding the White Rollercoaster with our lap bars as loose as possible.  In hindsight  that was silly.  But also awesome.  

In line at Lagoon 

 We all started High School in 1999, and looking back at a lot of my pictures, I can see why I may have chosen to remember so little of that period.  Everyone was dating during this time, and there was so much awkwardness I started blushing just looking at the pictures.   The elaborate ways we had to ask people out, the awkward hand positioning during pictures, spinning around in circles for hours on end...  But we obviously thought these things were worth documenting.  I haven't included many of the pictures here, in part because of the awkwardness, and in part because everyone (but Candace) has married other people and there's no need to dredge up old boyfriends.  The dresses and hair were definitely worth preserving though, because it was awesome to dress up.  Observe:

Prom 2002.  

I just love this picture.  I think Vanessa and I made awesome fairies. 2001-ish 

Obviously, we were hot stuff.  

And remember how I mentioned Candace, just a second ago?  She married to her high school sweetheart Jon, and they're just as adorable together now as they were then:

Sometimes I feel a little left out, when I think of the hairstyles popular during my time in high school, so little we have to regret.  With the exception of butterfly clips, there wasn't really much to cringe about.  Trudy was perhaps our most daring, when it came to hair, as illustrated in the platinum blond below:

For the most part, my friends and I couldn't be considered rebellious.  But Vanessa and I did have a flair for ditching school.  The most awesome time was the when we left school to visit the zoo.  With a camera.

I dare anyone to try looking this cool in an egg.  

Some of us got cars during this time (you'll find a blog about my chariot, Gus, after this one).  It was pretty rad to cruise around the suburbs, but we felt down right cool going to Salt Lake City every once and a while.  However, we were by no means rich, so once we got to the city, we found free things to do, like going to the pioneer museum:  

Remembering what awful drivers we were (yes, all of us were legitimately terrible drivers) is one of the few things that pains me about this time.  I recall rolling my eyes every time a driver's ed teacher would tell us "You think you're invincible, but you're not.  Slow down and wear your seat belt."  Without any irony, I recall thinking "I don't think I'm invincible, but I'm going to drive as fast as I want without my seat belt on.  Nothing bad is going to happen to me."  This feels especially stupid when I recall how many things we all rear-ended and drove head-on into, the number of speeding tickets we received, and the number of cars that were totalled (which is exactly what we did during our last girls night).  But we all lived through it, and for the most part, everyone seems to have slowed down, started checking their blind spots before making lane changes, and stopped backing over stuff.  For the most part.

After high school, we all generally stayed in northern Utah.  Some of us went to college, all but one got married and had children, and the Facebook became a thing.  It's been pretty great to keep track of these lovely ladies as our lives have become more hectic.  But it's even better when we get to catch up in person and reminisce about days gone by and laugh.  Oh so much laughing.  I don't think I'd have grown up to be the same person I am without my awesome friends.  And I look forward to several more decades full of memories and such.  Love you ladies.

My locker partner for many, may years, next to a locker.  

I thought duck face was a relatively new thing.  While I am ashamed of this face, it captures an important part of my adolescence - the movie theater.  

I just love this picture so much.  

Nostalgia - Little Girlies

I'm almost done with the nostalgia, I promise, but I've just got to talk about the Little Girlies.  By luck, or exceptionally wise planning, my parents managed to have their children in pairs, of sorts.  

My family, circa 2006, when they all stopped aging.  

This has given us all an ally (and an antagonist) growing up.  Liz and I had each other, there was Scott and Ryan together against a sea of girls, and Alex and Courtney - the Little Girlies.  Despite the fact that they are both taller than me and approaching adult-hood, they will always be the Little Girlies, it's just the way it has to be.  And here is how they will always look, about 4 and 7 years old.  

Alex is getting ready to graduate high school and start college at USU.  She's wicked smart, a great artist, and just a delight.  But a part of me wishes she was still this young: 

Courtney will start High School next year as a dancer on the drill team.  In addition to dancing, she's very driven with her school work and up for just about anything.  But I will always see her as this little baby here (she has it particularly rough because there's so much documentation of her as a baby):  

Obviously, I had a way with children.  

Alas, they've grown up and started accomplishing some pretty huge things.  I love them so much, and while it's a little frightening to watch them grow up, it's also great fun to have them become my friends and I'm very proud of them.  Love you Little Girlies.