Where have all the pictures gone?

Found 'em.
Here's another random smattering, playing catch up with my pictures and stories. 

A few years ago, I started this thing where every year (or so) I'd take up a new hobby for a year. I may or may not keep up with it, but I had to at least give it a shot.

First it was snowboarding (which I haven't done now in about five years, but hope to get into it again this year).Then it was mountain biking.Then running.

This year it's rock climbing.
I tried it once as a teenager and it freaked me out and I never tried it again. I didn't know if I could really get into it, as it's a completely different activity than what I'm usually into. But decided to give it another shot this summer. We haven't gone climbing as much as I'd hoped here at camp, but enough to know I can love it after all. It's a completely different challenge, which is exciting.

A couple of weekends ago, a group of us went to Spearfish Canyon on a hot and muggy day.

This girl is now in Alaska. It was so great meeting her at camp. As I said when we hugged goodbye, "This summer wouldn't have been anything without you." And it's true. We pretty much did everything together, from laundry to sleep overs to climbing to Outpost to cooking dinner to reading to making weekend plans. It's not typical, once out of the college dorms, to be in a situation where one spends such time with someone because you want to. Camp presents many various opportunities not always available in the "real world".

So we had a great summer and now Sassy's in Alaska for a month, and when she's back camp will be over and real life will have resumed and we'll live 45 minutes apart, but we still have our plans for fall and winter, don't worry.

This here's Cracker: climber, mountain biker, slack line extraordinaire:

And here are some of the others:

The Spiderman move?

And then we went to Joe and Sassy's house, and there was some bike riding and dinner making and I slept on an easy chair in the living room.

Outpost in the night:

One night we were having a Directors meeting in the office at around 10 o'clock, and it comes to our attention that there are no adult staff, although there are adult troop leaders, on the hill with the scouts for Outpost. Buck's like "Umm, we need someone up there. Now." So Sass and I are all "Ooh, pick me pick me!" which really wasn't much of a contest since no one else was jumping to volunteer.

So in the middle of the night we grab our things and head up the mountain, throw down sleeping bags in the clearing at the top, and wake the next morning at 5:00AM to head back down.

A couple of days ago (sans Sassy, she was already gone :-( I wanted to go on Outpost but couldn't leave until I'd closed the Trading Post, at around 10PM. Ducky, HawkEye and Basher were thrilled to wait and hike up with me in the dark.

There's a forest fire about 30 miles south of us, and from the top of Medicine Mountain it looks like a volcano erupting. Here we'd paused to take pictures.

When we got up there, Lost was already asleep in his hammock so naturally we had to wake him up. First, I tried to wake him up by taking his picture with my really annoyingly bright flash...

...and when that didn't work Ducky and Basher jostled the hammock until he finally said sleepily "Oh hey, guys". I said "Wow, Lost, you look dead in this picture" and as soon as he heard MY voice he instantly says "Who wants chocolate?!" What the - ? So we all had a good laugh, and some chocolate.

I can't even tell you how much I love sleeping atop Medicine Mountain, down in "our spot" by the cliff's edge. Sassy wasn't there, of course, and it was hot and dry so I brought a tarp just in case, but knew I really wouldn't need a shelter. I found a perfectly flat spot, and read by the light of my headlamp for a while, and then lay watching the stars flicker and shoot across the sky. It was the perfect temperature, not hot or cold, just neutral and calm. I'm sure going to miss throwing down a sleeping bag and sleeping under the stars once or twice a week when camp is over.

And, of course, walking through the meadow I love in the morning:

Last Tuesday I took Bomb, the mountain bike director who doesn't really mountain bike, and his boys to one of my favorite trails so they could experience riding single track (we mostly have logging roads around camp).

It was pretty fun, and great to be back riding again. I haven't ridden much at all this summer, as I'd intended to. There are other things I haven't done as well, that I'd hoped to do. But there's enough great things that happened that it's all good. It's all a balancing act.

Oh, the night before Lost, me, Basher and Jazz randomly decided to go out riding, too. Jazz had never been so I had fun giving him the inside scoop, sharing tips and postures. We didn't get to go far as it started getting dark, and we ended up bush wacking our way down the hill in the near dark as it is. But I sure do love those kids.

Well, it's all I got.
More pictures to come.