Friday March 12th 2010

Sorry it's taken me awhile to finish up the last few days of our trip, I blame the end of the semester being so busy.

Exact words from my journal describing today "Today was really awesome, a cherry on the top of one of the best weeks ever. But a well earned, hard fought over cherry."

So we're all packed but there's one last thing we have to do, gather sticks. Yep that's right we needed to gather kindling for our fire so we went around campus and picked up sticks and stuff that were on the ground. I can only imagine what the people of CCU were thinking.

With that done we hopped in the van with our backpacks sitting on our laps and left to head to Estes Park, wooo! On Thursday they had told us where we were going and they also told us that we wouldn't truly be backpacking because we were just hiking in the mountains and then going back to a campsite and then hiking again the next day. Our group was apparently too big and it was too early in the season to set up camp in the mountains, but it all worked out.

Our Van struggled to get up the mountains but we made it up and learned that we would have a guide for our trip. God worked a miracle and Alicia and Lindsay were able to find Kelly who was a CMU graduate and had actually been involved with His House but moved out to Denver and leads children's groups and other things out there. She lived right by Estes Park so we were able to use her apartment to change and stuff before heading out on our adventure.

We finally made it to the trail head of where we would be hiking and put on our hats and gloves and stuff and headed up the mountain. Kelly said we would be going to about 10,000 feet and that it would be a 3 mile hike round trip. For me the hardest part was the first tenth of a mile, getting adjusted to the altitude and trying to get a good body temperature that wasn't too hot or cold was difficult, but after that it was pretty smooth sailing.

It was so beautiful and breathtaking on top of the mountain and we got to hike across a frozen river and just see God's beauty displayed all around us. We may or may not have gotten off of the trail we were supposed to be on and ended up somewhere where we didn't really know where we were, but we were able to turn around and just head back down the mountain.

We packed a ton of granola bars, energy bars, trail mix, and sandwiches to eat while we were up there and ate those along the trail and for lunch, we even stopped at one point and made hot chocolate with some little gas heater things.

The hiking part was pretty hard work but to get to the top and see all of the mountains and landscape was very awesome! It's hard to describe everything that we saw and did because it's really different than anything and you should just go experience it for yourself.

We survived the mountain and headed to our campsite to get all set up before it got dark. On our way we saw a huge herd of elk, probably around 200 of them, it was super cool to see them. It's not everyday you run into an elk, much less 200 of them!!!!!

We unpacked our van and got to work making our tents, which I thought would be difficult but we managed to set up 4 tents in no time at all, girl power! For dinner we made rice sides, yumm, we had quite an assembly line going, filling the cups, putting them on the burners, pouring the water into the rice bag, and closing the rice bag and checking it for when it's done.

After dinner Kelly took us to a really big field, the one where we saw the huge herd of elk actually, and we were able to just look at all the stars. She was pointing out different constellations and stars and other things and then we split up and just laid there, it was really really awesome. There were so many stars, Kelly said we could probably see the entire milky way! To see God's majesty and beauty displayed in the sky in such a miraculous way was just spectacular. We sat there for awhile just in awe and then headed back to our campsite.

When we got back Alicia and Lindsay had made us a nice little fire, something we wouldn't have been able to have if we had legit backpacked. It was nice and warm and we sat around and Kelly told us her testimony. It was cool cause we barely knew her but she was sharing her whole life story with us because she knew that God wanted her to and that it would change our lives. It definitely impacted my life.

After her testimony we did some worship. I think that there's something about a fire and camping that makes worship so much more meaningful and cool.

Kelly headed back to her own apartment to get some sleep, apparently sleeping in the cold didn't sound appealing ;) After she left Jannan shared her testimony, which was also very moving and brought a different perspective and insight into her life. The whole night was just super awesome.

Now we had to set to work getting ready to go to sleep, which apparently means we have to do alot so that we don't freeze. We had to change and what I ended up wearing to bed was a pair of underarmor leggings, yoga pants, sweatpants, and windbreakers, and then an underarmor shirt, a long sleve shirt, a fleece, a sweatshirt, and my winter jacket, only slightly less bulk than the kid in The Christmas Story. We also heated up water and put that in our water bottle and stuck in our sleeping bag, along with 6 handwarmers. I was afraid that I might get cold but I was pretty toasty all night.

Our first day of backpacking and adventure was really truly freaking awesome.