Summer Part 2

4 posts in 2 days has got to be a record! Anyway, after I made the last post, I was looking through the camera and found these pics and just had to share. This is part of the high ropes course. This particular one is called the Alpine Tower. It is 60 feet of extremely hard work! The goal is to get to the top. There are several different ways to get there as you can see. You must be at least 16 years old to climb so not many of our youth were old enough. It ended up being TJ, me, a junior sponsor named Ashley, and one youth that we convinced should try. As Ashley and I were the only ones that had ever climbed before, we chose the easier of the paths to the top. That is not saying much as it was still difficult! I was so proud of Kate. She was completely terrified to climb. You are harnessed in and your belaying partner is usually one of the people that you came with. Now the scary part of that is the fact that whoever is belaying you may have just learned how to do it before you began! Yeah you heard that right, your life is in the hands of someone you may or may not know and who may or may not have any experience belaying! So the climb up is long and tedious but once you get to the top and stand up there 60 feet in the air and see what you have done you feel amazing! Then they tell you to sit on the top of the platform and push off. That means that you are literally held and kept from a plunging death only by your belaying partner. Fun stuff. So I got to be TJ's belaying partner when he climbed. Now I used to ditch class in college and load up with some buddies and go rock climbing. So I have experience climbing as well as belaying. But it has been a while. So when TJ bailed off the side of the platform i was totally unprepared. He literally picked me up off of my feet when his weight hit the end of the rope! I eventually got him down though with out a single scratch! So then it was my turn. Rather than let a kid that I didn't know belay me, I had TJ be my partner. Who better to trust than my husband right? Well that made for an interesting combination. You need to have a little bit of slack in your climbing rope so that you are not literally pulled up to the platform by the seat of your pants. I like to believe that TJ loved me so much that he didn't want to risk letting me fall. He had my rope pulled so tight several times that I couldn't even move! I had to ask him to give me slack so that I wasn't going up the tower bottom first! All in all we had a blast and it was awesome to hear the encouragement of all the people around cheering you on. Maybe next year we will try the firecrackers. Those are the free swinging logs you can see in some of the photos. What do you think?