August 15, 2009
I hate being sick. I have just come down with a fever late last night, and it’s still lingering now in the morning. So instead of climbing today as planned, I’ll actually be productive with my blogs, resume, laundry, and many other things on my “To Do” list.
Last Saturday, after working on my resume, shopping, and other chores, I did some baking and headed to the annual chili cook off at Christina’s house. I was lame and didn’t make any chili for I’m not much of a cook (and I didn’t want to have to buy all the ingredients), but I did make some cornbread, which was of course needed and brownies which were a hit. It was a fun time-the chili was delicious and “prizes” given for the Hottest, the most creative, the most colorful, the best vegetarian, and the best Carnivore. Even Jim Dougan showed up and a group of us had an interesting conversation on our different views of death (can’t remember how we got on to the conversation and it wasn’t as depressing a discussion as you would think).I then got a ride back from someone who was crashing on our coach that night-Chris, who works in Denver with a wildlife resource management program for the national parks. We hung out the next morning, and he was a huge help with helping me to remake my federal job application, which was completely different from the application I learned to make in college. In the afternoon, I did some climbing with Christina and her boyfriend Jim at Combat rock. I am ashamed to say I bailed on a 5.9+-mainly because the fall would not have been a pretty one and I don’t think I’ve been leading enough lately to have the mental confidence to make the moves.
Monday to Thursday, the whole wilderness crew was out together in the backcountry all four days on Timber Creek Trail. There wasn’t much tent pad work to actually do there for the week, but there was nothing for us to do if we went back a day early since Tara was probably still out. So Wednesday, we devoted a whole day to orienting ourselves to the park by hiking up Ida and this other smaller mountain next to it (so basically we had the whole day to relax and hike). That same night was the meteor shower, and I hiked up to the top of Jackstraw Mountain to watch it for an hour. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to stay up till 2 in the morning for the peak of the shower-it was a little chilly on the mountain top, but I did see a number of gorgeous meteors streak across the dark night sky before I headed down to my warm tent.
Thursday night, in celebration of Christina’s birthday (which is the 13th), the crew hung out for a couple of hours at the Rock Inn. There I met the new climbing ranger in charge of Longs peaks rescues (Jim Detterline’s old job)-Sam. He’s a rather funny guy with a few interesting stories in his background that Tara told us about. I made plans with him to go to Boulder the next day for some shopping and climbing
Friday ended up not being as productive a day as I was hoping. We were supposed to go climbing in the morning and then shopping in the afternoon where I’d have plenty of time to hang out a café to get all the work I need done on the internet and make some phone calls. The weather in the morning ended up being bad though, so Same grabbed a breakfast and got his car registered which ended up taking him an hour and then finally we headed down to Boulder. At least down there I got my food shopping done, finally got a new pair of hiking pants for cheap and dropped my climbing shoes off to be expensively resoled (it probably would have cost just a little more for a brand new pair of new shoes through pro-deal, but then, I didn’t have time to wait for a brand new pair of shoes to be mailed before I break through my “new” pair of climbing shoes- besides, first pair of climbing shoes, you grow sort of attached to them and their broken in already-which saves me from a slow, painful process).
By the time we were done shopping, the weather had cleared for some climbing and we went to do some climbing in Boulder canyon-got 3 pitches in. I could have lead some trad then, but I was feeling suddenly very tired, so we just headed out after the 3rd pitch. On our drive back to Estes, I began to notice I was feeling really off, and within a couple of hours, the fever hit.
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