Surviving week four

Perhaps my title for this post is a little over dramatic, but it brings together nicely the two defining aspects of this week. First and foremost is my epic adventure to the top of Baldy Mountain - elevation 12,441 feet. It's difficult to tell how long the hike actually was in distance, partly because the map seems to think that the whole day was around eight miles, and partly because your brain and body wants it to be somewhere around five hundred. To be perfectly honest, I gave up a mile from the summit; I sat down on a fallen log, told my group to go on without me and watched them get out of sight. I had brought along my stunt kite to fly at the top as a kind of victory flag, and I handed it over in defeat, to be flown by my friends in my stead.

Fortunately for me, my ADHD kicked in about fifteen minutes later. I dumped out a nalgene of water to lighten my pack and walked forward a little, thinking to shorten the time before my group picked me up on the way down. I stopped frequently, propping myself up against trees in just the manner that we are forbidden to out here every few feet, thinking that surely this was my final destination. And every time, I coaxed a few more feet out of myself, secure in the knowledge that my group would be along at any moment. When I reached the tree line, I stopped lying to myself: I wanted to reach the top. When I crested the mountain, we realized two things: first, that I still had the kite strings in my pack, and second, I had arrived only fifteen minutes behind the others.

Unfortunately, the second obstacle of this week was that this was our first LDS week. Our schedule was completely turned on its head, and I had a relatively small group with only fifteen kids (Kari's ropers numbered twenty-six). The kids were actually quite well behaved for the most part, but there's just something exhausting about getting hit with that many people. It's like you go to sleep every night and wake up the next day to find yourself just as tired as you were the night before. I arranged to hike Trail Peak today (at a scant 10,000 feet) and decided to put it off until Sunday.

Next week is the second LDS week. The numbers are bigger, but I still have the second smallest group (only seventeen eleven-year-olds). I don't know, maybe management thinks I'm going soft. Then again, when has taking care of eleven year old boys ever been easy?