A Hike to Remember

Among the many, many things we did this summer, Chad and I took a trip to Colorado. There is a race out there called the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race. As the name implies, it’s 100 miles (closer to 104, actually), raced on a mountain bike, and at high elevation (mostly over 10,000 feet). Chad got an entry to the race through a lottery last winter, so we’d been planning to make the trip for a few months. But I’ll talk more about the race itself later this week.

We knew that since we were going to take over a week off to make the trip, we wanted to do more than just the race. So we made plans to camp, hike, and ride for the first half of the trip. In the week before leaving, we found out that some friends of ours would be camping in a different part of the state than we had planned to. We could go camp with them, which would be a lot of fun, but it would have come at the sacrifice of hiking a 14er like we had planned. We discussed it for a few days, but Chad insisted that he wanted to do the hike more than being able to mountain bike with friends.

Tuesday, August 7, we set out to hike Mount Shavano. I was really worried about getting caught in an afternoon storm while above the treeline, after having read and heard a number of horror stories. We started the hike before sunrise, and planned to be back at the car shortly after noon. I was dealing with an ankle injury, so we figured we needed to plan for almost as much time to descend the mountain as we would need to ascend it.

It was absolutely gorgeous. The path had us follow the Colorado Trail for about a quarter of a mile before we began up the path to summit Mount Shavano. The trail alternated between incredible steep sections, and less steep sections, but there was never any doubt that you were headed up. At one point we walked along a beautiful little mountain creek, which we took advantage of for pictures on the way down.

Finally, we made it above the tree line! In Colorado the average elevation of the treeline is 12,000 feet. Since the trail head is at about 9,800 this marked the halfway point! Above the treeline there were soooooo many chipmunks! Seriously, they were everywhere. It was adorable. We also spotted what we thought at the time to be a groundhog, but later found out was a marmot...also adorable.

Above the treeline the trail was really steep. There were a lot of sections where the percent grade was at least 100% (100% grade equates to a 45 degree angle). We’re both in pretty good shape (well, depending who you ask, we have high standards and tend to compare ourselves to high level athletes), so the effort of climbing was intense but manageable. We had taken precautions to handle the high altitude, and in fact noticed no issues aside from using more of our lung volume. But. My ankle was struggling. The steepness of the trail was forcing it to stretch back much further than was comfortable. The steepness also prohibited me from stepping only on the front of my foot, as that simply wasn’t enough traction on the rock/gravel trail. I pushed for a while, but promised Chad I wouldn’t injure myself further. Personally I was okay with regressing the injury-it was worth it for the chance to do this hike-but I wasn’t okay with making it worse.

Finally I realized that I was on the edge of making it worse. I decided to try a few steps down the mountain to see how difficult that would be. From a time standpoint, if it was going to take me as long to go down as it had to come up we were close to needing to turn around. When I started stepping down I realized that the poor traction while traveling up was much worse going down, which quite frankly scared me. If I’m going to be completely honest, I wanted to panic a bit.

I turned to Chad, and apologized. I needed to turn around. We weren’t to the summit yet, by our estimates we were at about 13,000 feet. It was a clear, crisp morning, and the view was gorgeous. Already we were above the other summits we could see from that side of the mountain. When I told Chad that I needed to turn around he reassured me that it was fine, but that we needed to pause where we were for a moment because he had a surprise.

I promptly sat down. Right in the middle of the trail. To be fair, we had not seen a single person out there besides ourselves, so I wasn’t worried about being in the way. But still, I probably wouldn’t have plopped quite that way if I had known what was coming.

Chad set his pack down behind me. While I stared out at the view, he rummaged down to the bottom, then stood up.

He came around and kneeled in front of me, and proposed.

I emphatically said yes, kissed him, and wiped my eyes. 

Like I said, there wasn't anyone else around, so this is our immediately post-engagement self portrait.

The ring was originally my great-grandmothers. The story goes that it was given to her by her parents on her 16th birthday. They told her that they wanted her to marry whoever she truly loved, and not for a diamond. So they gave her a diamond of her own. As it turns out, she married a doctor who bought her many other treasures, but they were certainly in love. A rather apt history for an engagement ring, don’t you think?

Back to Blogging

What a summer it has been. It’s a bit overwhelming to try to play catch-up here. Although a whole lot happened, and much of it was worthy of discussing here, I’m only going to try to get a few posts up about the most important events. So this week will be a bit of a recap week.

As for right now, well, we took the MCAT, which lifted the load enormously. It’s a big stress relief to have that in the rear-view mirror. Not to mention finally being finished with the studying. That’s about 2-3 hours given back on weekdays, and twice that on the weekends. Naturally that time has been quickly filled, but our apartment is much cleaner, our bikes have seen the light of day, and our friends can once again be certain that we do, in fact, exist.

I’ve also managed to make it back into the kitchen and have been trying some new meals! Hopefully I’ll start remembering to take pictures of them so that they can be posted.

And with that, I’m leaving this as a short post. A story from this summer will be up tomorrow!

The Absentee Blogger

I'm sorry. I just, up and left right after talking about trying to post more. Rude.

It's been a while. Weeks, actually. In fact, if I'd waited three more days I could have called it a month. Well, it's been 28 days, so I guess I could call it a month, except it's not February. Anyway.

There have been a few lessons I've learned in the last few weeks. Important ones, like friendship and forgiveness. Ready for me to say something really cliche? Life is too short to hold grudges. It's negative, and it draws an incredible amount of energy out of you-without you ever realizing it.

I'm crazy busy right now. I want to finish my PhD within a year, which is a very difficult, but obtainable goal. It's just doable enough that I have to go for it, but just ambitious enough that I'm a bit stressed about making it happen. I have plans that I hope to start next fall, but they are contingent on finishing the PhD first.

So realistically, I'm going to be gone for a while longer. I should be back in September. I'll try to post a little here and there between now and then, but no promises.

I think I'm going to have a lot to say about time management when I get back. It's a topic that I have a lot of well developed thoughts on, and the last several weeks have given me some really great practice in high level execution of my techniques. After all, this blog is named Meting Life for a reason, I don't think it would kill me to blog somewhat on topic at least for a while.

Remember my post about To-Do lists? That's pure gold, and what I'm living on right now. I'm surviving by prioritized to-do lists, and accepting the limitations of what can be done in a day. It's the only reason I'm not having daily panic attacks.

I hope your summer is going well! Enjoy the produce, it's amazing :-)

PS-You have got to make these cookies:

The picture isn't very pretty, but let me tell you what those are. Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies. Start with your favorite sugar cookie dough, add between 1/2 tsp and 1 tsp peppermint extract, and a cup or two of chocolate chips. Bake at 350 degrees for about 8 minutes-longer for larger cookies, these are spoonfuls of dough. You want these to stay soft. I'm usually fairly lukewarm about mint chocolate chip stuff (I like it, but it's not my first choice) but these are easily in my top 3 favorite cookies. You can add green food coloring like Betty does (I got the idea from her, through StumbleUpon) but I thought it was unnecessary, and it looked a little like the Hulk and kinda creepy to me.

Highwayman: My First Words in Public

To be clear, I don’t have any personal recollection of this story. And it likely isn’t 100% true, but I’m pretty sure this incident did, in fact, happen.

All children have their first words. Usually Da-da is claimed by fathers as the first, but a lot of moms speculate it’s just repeating syllables that happen to make a word. I’m not getting into that debate. Nobody wins there. As to my own first words...well I have no clue what they were.

What I do know, is the story of my first words in public. I guess I only spoke around family at first? We’ll assume so for the purposes of this story. So. My first words in public.

We were eating at a restaurant, “we” being comprised of Mom, Dad, Brooke and Holly (two of my sisters), and myself. Throughout the meal Brooke and Holly were patiently coaching me to say something to a non-family member. They worked and worked and worked at it. As far as I know, the meal more or less progressed uneventfully.

At the end of the meal, the waitress came to our table with the bill. This was it. This was my moment. It was my time to shine. And shine I did.

“Charge it to Daddy!!!”

Words for a little girl to live by.

Note: I feel a couple things are worth noting. First, I sought my own financial independence pretty quickly after graduating high school, so I wasn’t really a Daddy’s plastic kind of girl. That being said, through the end of his life, Dad maintained a credit card with my name linked to his account in case I needed it. Even when I refused to carry it, he continued to order it and keep it close by, that way if something did happen he could have it to me by the next day.

Second, Dad was one of the best shopping partners I have ever known. He had a great eye for what would stand out and be fashionable-but not a fad. 

Finally, keep an eye on the comments section of this post. I’m counting on Mom to post corrections to this story. Ready, Mom? I’m testing to see if you read through the end of my posts. Just kidding! I have no doubt you’ll read all of this.