Bouldering

Yesterday was a fairly warm day, so we decided to go bouldering. There is this great place locally where you walk about 1.7 miles in and it comes to all these rock formations. Some are kid size crawling and some are moderate, and some extremely difficult. Most are meant for climbing without gear, but there are some places straight up that I saw come people actually rock climbing.
So we brought our dogs hiking for the first time...and it was so funny to watch them take off up these boulders and even leap up 3 feet to get to the next spot..Especially our hound, we figure she is part mountain goat. In the next picture she raced to the top of this probably 20 foot high sloping rock with a pretty good jump at the end for her....all for her to literally go to the back of the formation where it drops straight down..and literally jump right off the rock. Scared me to death! Crazy thing was fine...but seriously scared me!

Then Jacob and I tied up the dogs below and did some climbing of our own.

There are a lot of great foot holds, and challenging climbs. It is fun to be climbing up something that isn't a set path and try to figure out how your going to get up to the top.

After I took the picture of Jacob above, I climbed up after him ( not quite as skillfully as him, but I did it) and found the above picture in the cave at the top. I thought it was beautiful, and looked like a mother holding her baby. After we reached the cave we continued climbing until we were at the top of the formation. I made Jacob go down without me to take this picture...unfortunately I didn't realize that getting down is much harder than going up..Jacob told me to go off the back way and jump to another formation where it was a easy climb down.
So

That "jump" to the next formation? Ended up a five foot jump over a hundred+ foot crevice. And not onto level ground either! The other formation was just as loose and rocky as the one I was standing on. It scared me so badly. I couldn't believe he just jumped it without a pause. I had to climb down a bit and jump and grab a rock to hang onto to save my life.

It reminded me of this time my friend Craig and my roommates and I went swimming at this river, and it had a telephone pole leaning slightly over the river, he went up and jumped off, so I thought I could too. I climbed up there and then froze thinking about all the paralyzing 'could happens" I was probably up there 30 minutes before I jumped.

Knowing I could freeze and paralyze myself with scary thoughts...and this was the "only" way down, I jumped. and nothing happened, I was completely safe. I just had to pull myself up and over the edge to get on top of the next formation.

Unfortunately there are no more pictures..I only had room for 3 on my cell, but it was a pretty eventful and fun day for both of us! And I'm sure we will be back! Even better, it stirred up or desire to go hiking every chance the weather gives us. So I'm sure there is more fun to come!