9/30/2011
Day 1(again): Ahhhhh, the glory of not having ridiculous quantities of car troubles.
We made excellent time today! It certainly helps that we didn’t get 3 flat tires on a crappy home-made trailer and instead hauled butt!!! It was a fun drive up, lots of excellent music!
I’m always so surprised at how relieved I feel to get here. I seem to continuously come to a new understanding of how much I need this place each time I get here. We brought two new girls with us today, which meant a camp tour! We went on a big hike up one canyon and beyond, over the ridge and down the other canyon. The whole way we talked of our plans to take a big backpacking trip to Colorado the summer before all of us go off to college. We made plans to take some weekends next semester to train with packs in the local mountains such that we can really be prepared for the high mountain terrain of Colorado! It’s gonna be amazing! I loved going on the hike today; this place is just amazingly beautiful. It is almost October now and it’s interesting to see how the plants have changed so much just over the last few weeks. It seems like I’ve been gone for a long time since our last adventure here…but at the same time it feels like I never left. I’m so happy to have an escape here at camp. Most people have some sort place that they go to in their head when they daydream, mine is camp…and I actually get to go here in real life. It feels so good to get away from everything. The first 6 week term of my senior year ended about a week ago and I’m beginning to realize just how fast this year is going to go. I feel like this is going to pretty much be my last weekend to relax (how relaxing is it really when we’ll be working tons tomorrow) because once I get back I have tons of college applications and scholarship applications…it’ll feel good to be able to put the fact that I am a Girl Scout Gold Award recipient (or soon will be) on those applications.
It’s only the troop this time at CMW. This means that we don’t have to stay up the canyons in one of the units, and, therefore, don’t have to stay in the cabins. As I sit here shivering I am so happy I have four walls because it is super cold even though we are staying in the lodge and have a fire going. It feels so nice to be able to sleep on the floor next to the warm fire in my favorite place in the world.
We’ve already had some pretty great adventures during the 7 or so hours we’ve been here, let the adventures continue tomorrow!!
~Runner
10/1/2011
Day 2: My. Body. Hurts.
Today started at 6:45 with the noise of my beeping watch alarm. It signaled the time to get up and go up the new trail to watch the sunrise at Halfway to Heaven. What we didn’t take into account is the fact that as we get closer to winter, the sun gets closer to the equator…which means it doesn’t rise in the same place…which pretty much made the whole thing really anticlimactic. But I still got some good photos of the colors that the sky took on and some of the new wildflowers that have come up over the last month. We stayed up there for a long time and came down practically right when breakfast started at 8. Breakfast was (as usual) ridiculously delicious.
Our first part of the day consisted of all of us going up to the arts and crafts building to work on Sparky’s Gold Award Project. A couple people and I built a set of steps going up to one of the side doors…it was pretty awesome! I was super surprised with how neat and professional they looked, we’re pretty damn good for people who have never done any sort of carpentry. The time at A & C was filled with bees (which we later discovered have an underground nest in front of the building) who stung practically everybody except for me and a couple others.
We ate lunch, which was, as usual, ridiculously delicious. After lunch we split into our various groups to go work on our individual projects. Today, that included painting lots of rocks white. We painted all the rocks along the perimeter of Quiver’s archery range and ran out of white paint about halfway through painting the rocks on the lower edge of my trial. We eventually decided to white-wash them using a mixture of lime and water. Somewhere in the middle of all of that we went up to the top of the canyon to gather tons on trash to haul. In that process we found an old Jacuzzi. Yeah, I know. What the hell is a hot tub doing in the middle of the woods? I have the same question.
It was a long day. I did lots of drilling, hammering, sawing, walking, bending over, and painting…rocks…which was strangely satisfying, especially since it was the least precise thing ever! I feel quite excellent at the moment, which is mainly fueled by the fact that I just washed my hair; given, we don’t have hot water so I was washing with really freaking cold water, but it still feels really good to have clean feet and clean hair. Time to play cards!!
~Runner
10/2/2011
Day 3: Finishing touches.
Last night after dinner Ninja and I went up to put glow-in-the-dark thumbtacks in the trees lining the trail with flashlights literally strapped to our heads. This morning right after breakfast we went out and finished whitewashing the rest of the rocks and walking the trail to scatter some pine needles in order to prevent it from getting muddy and washing away.
We got to the top and took lots of excellent and silly pictures. And of course had the usual excellent experience.
On the way home we stopped by the big fancy playground in Alamagordo...it was AWESOME!
~Runner
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