In my opinion, Heaven will look like City of Rocks.  When we go there, there’s no “vacation” about it, there’s just too much fun stuff to do – climbing (obviously), running, scrambling, exploring, building a fire, poking sticks into the fire, cooking hot dogs and marshmallows over the fire, chopping more wood for the fire (see a theme?).  We arrived at our usual familiar campsite Thursday afternoon and immediately started climbing on Practice rock. 

One perk of our usual campsite is that we are close to Practice rock and Elephant rock, so we can see when people are there and then walk from our site.  From Practice, I could see that no one was on the route “Wheat Thin”, rated 5.7 on the climbing difficulty scale (not too hard), on Elephant rock, so Abby and I hurried down to climb it.  This was a great moment in my life, I’ve looked at this route countless times and have been waiting for Abby to progress to the point where we could climb it together.  Without going into detail, I need someone to belay me as I climb to the top and set up an anchor, then the follower takes out the gear I placed and we walk off the back side together.  If the follower can’t make it up the route and clean the gear, well, it turns into an event.  Abby did great, and we had a great time walking to the top of the rock and then scrambling down together.  We ate hot dogs and s’mores at 10:30 that night.

 

Our friends, the Hunsakers, joined us later that night.  It was so fun for the kids to have friends their age there, and they spent many hours exploring and goofing around together.  No one got bored while someone else was climbing.  And now that Abby and Caleb can belay, as well as our friend Nate, everyone got to climb as much as they wanted. 

 

Friday we climbed a couple routes on Practice rock until we lost our shade.  After lunch we went to the Breadloaves and climbed a couple routes up there in a big, shady corridor between two rock formations.  It’s a great spot to keep kids entertained and adults cool in the afternoon.  We discovered that if you want a climbing area to yourselves, bring 8 kids along.  The highlight of the day for Caleb was when we went back to Elephant rock and climbed Wheat Thin again, and he got to climb it too.  We were very late for dinner, though.

 

Saturday morning Nate and I ran a variation of what I believe is the coolest trail run around.  I decided on a “short-cut” to my normal route, which turned out not to be.  It’s a great intro to the City, because you see (if not run through) most of it.  We climbed Practice rock again that morning, then after lunch headed up to Bath rock.  Nate and I both belayed from the top so we could have two climbers going up the 180-foot face at the same time.  Caleb and Sagin climbed right next to each other and jabbered together the whole way up and down, it was pretty funny.  Sienna got a bloody nose about 2/3rd of the way up.  After her brother finished his climb, I rappelled down to her and helped her back to the ground.  There was blood all over her and the rock.  We called it a day, my hands were so tired from all the climbing and (mostly) belaying.  Even though we still got to bed late, at least it was still light when we ate dinner.

 

As we were getting ready for bed, a warm breeze picked up.  Then it became a hurricane.  We’ve experienced wind in the tent trailer before, but never like that.  I thought it was going to tear us apart.  When I got up the wind was lifting the bed under Jennie.  Caleb, Seth, and Hannah were sound asleep.  After a prayer, Jennie and I decided that rather than spending a sleepless night waiting for the trailer to blow over, we would pack up and go home.  So at 12:30 I threw gear into the back of the truck, kids into the front of the truck, and we put down the trailer and headed out, arriving home a little after 4:00 a.m.  Not exactly the sleeping in and leisurely packing up that we had originally planned.  The boys slept all the way home, then slept in their beds until 1:00 p.m., probably 14 hours.  Apparently they were tired.

 

Pictures soon to come.