The Great Outdoors
Alas, I am home from my long awaited journey into the deep wilderness. It was a great adventure. I will retell the story in half detail. :o) It started around 9am when Mr.Schmidt picked me up. We drove to somewhere near Kirkwood and went to the ranger station to reserve our campsite. There were only three sites at the place where Steve wanted to take us, so we wanted to be sure to get one. We did! And we got the best one too. Yay! After that, we wandered around Woods Lake for a while. It was cool because I would say, "Hey Steve, wanna climb to the top of those rocks?" And he'd be like, "Yeah, lets go." We did that about 3 times, and the last time was this insane rock climb. I wouldn't admit it for a while, but I was a little scared. I'm glad we got to the top though because the view was amazing! There were even a couple of marmots at the top. Getting down was tough but we made it. After that, we were met by Lori and Stephanie and proceeded to head to the campsite. 2 1/2 miles later we were there. We set up camp and headed to bed a while after. But not before I spilled our water for dinner 3 times! Ghetto. The tent situation the first night was: Lori and Steph in one, Steve in one, and me in one. Thankfully, there weren't any bears or else I would have been knocking on someone's tent door in the middle of the night. I was the first to wake up on Saturday morning, so I went and pumped some water and then decided that it wasn't very fun to be the only one up, so I went and cheerfully awoke Stephanie and Lori. I opened their tent only to find a perfect spot for me to sleep in the next night. We all got up and ate breakfast and waited for our dear friend Greg to meet us so we could begin our wild journey to the top of Round Top. When Greg came, we hung out for a bit and then started off on our wild hike. There was a trail leading up to the foot of the mountain, but after that we were on our own. I embraced the pioneer spirit, prayed to God that I wouldn't die, and climbed the summit with my 3 friends.
When we got to the top, I was awestruck. No matter how many times I look at creation, I always seem to look at it in the same light, like I've never seen something so beautiful before in my life. We spent some time just hanging out at the top, and then decided we had better make the trek back to camp. What a journey that was! I decided that I wanted to play in the snow that was around the mountain and I clumsily slipped on the ice. haha. Then I made a snow angel. Come on, who gets to make a snow angel in August? :o) We finally made it back to our campsite and got our swimming attire on. Seeing as it was a warm day, we were all a bit anxious to jump in the lake after a long hike. But, silly us, we didn't really take into account that the lake was simply melted snow! Basically ice water. Lori braved the cold first, then Steve, then Greg, and finally Stephanie. I sat there contemplating whether I should go in or not. What finally convinced me to go in was the fact that I had to go pee, and I didn't want to do it in the back of a rock, oh and Stephanie splashing me helped too. After our "polar bear swim", we hung out and played "I've Never". That was quite interesting. You learn a lot about people when you play that game, there were definitely many laughs during that game. When the sun set, we all headed over to this field and watched it. Amazing. Then, we went back to camp and lounged some more. I saw the craziest shooting star ever, Greg witnessed it too. It just kind of stayed in one place and kept dimming. It was weird, but cool. So, we finally went to bed (I slept in Steph and Lori's tent this time) and slept restlessly because of the wind. But, we did sleep and woke up the next morning, packed our stuff and hiked out. Oh, and then got yummy pizza. And that was my weekend. It not only met, but surpassed my expectations. It awakened my heart once more to close I feel to God in creation, and to the fact that there's no other place where I feel more free than in the outdoors. It sounds so cheesy, but I'm not kidding. I think I'll change my major to hunting and gathering :o)