A Little Visit to the BIG CO: Part I

One of the things that the Lord has blessed me with are friends that live in some pretty sweet places. I recently just got back from the Front Range in Colorado where I spent some time with some friends of mine in Denver and Colorado Springs. It was a great, and much needed, week of R&R. I spent some time with an old college roommate, went scrambling** (more on that later) with a brand new friend, and hung out for a few days with some classmates from Focus Institute. Again, you can't have a bad week when visiting Colorado, especially when there is no agenda and you don't have much of a care in the world.

Memorial Day, I traveled with a new buddy of mine, Hugh White, to Garden of the Gods in the Springs area. The original plan was to rock climb all morning. However, when we got there, we realized one of his friends had his belay device***, so we couldn't climb. Of course we weren't just going to pack up and go home, so we decided to scramble a bit. We looked over at Kindergarten Rock, the longest and second or third tallest in the park, and decided to go get it done. Here are some resulting pics of our scramble.

Yes, we went straight up this
A view of some of the other more famous formations

The view straight down
The view straight up

Hugh and I had an absolute blast doing this. We spent a good chunk of time talking and enjoying God's beauty at the top (especially the views of Pike's Peak). We also messed around a bit on some small boulders and rocks at the top. We'd jump from rock to rock, trying different holds while not falling 250+ feet to our deaths. It was just one of the cool adventures I had during my time out there. More stories to come.

**Scrambling sounds really manly and scary, but it's not as hard core as I can talk it up to be. Scrambling is a step down from straight up free climbing (no ropes, but your not climbing 80 to 90 degree rock faces either).
***For you climbers out there, if we had our heads on straight we could have just made a muenter hitch with our rope. Unfortunately, we didn't have our heads with us... maybe it was the altitude.