White Water Rafting, Rock Climbing, and Lost Keys – Part 2

Day #3: The Waterfall and Rock Climbing

On the morning of Day 3, I woke up to one of the most wonderful sounds of nature – my car alarm. Apparently the camp earlybird (Bethany) tried to get out the cooler of food we had locked in the car the night before. That set of the car alarm, which sent me into a scramble to find the keys and hope that the remote would turn the alarm off without me having to get out of my tent. It did. Lucky me.

The Waterfall

By the time the guys and I finally got up, Abby, Bethany, and Mariah had gone on a hike to scout out the waterfall we could see from our campsite. The boys and Vanessa and Sarah somehow stumbled out of bed and had breakfast while out fearless outdoorswomen were busy exploring the great outdoors.

The explorers returned and we all went on a hike to the waterfall. All of us, that is, except Vanessa, who decided to stay at camp and read and try to nap on a tree that hung over the “creek.” The waterfallers hiked up to the waterfall in short order to find that the waterfall was much larger than it looked from our campsite. Everyone but me took off their shoes and climbed onto a cool rock while I took some a few awesome pictures and video. After that, Zach and myself climbed up to the base of the waterfall, took off our shirts, and took an icy shower. We returned from our hike with just enough time to have lunch and head to Granite, CO for some rock climbing.

Video of the Amazing Waterfall

There’s Nobody Here…

As we began our drive to the rock climbing outfitter, I quickly realized that I didn’t have directions. Not a problem… I just called the place and was told to look for a place a few miles outside of Buena Vista on the left side of the road with a sign and several buses. As I turned into the parking lot with lots of Arkansas Valley Adventure busses, we all began to feel like we were in the middle of an old western. No one was there. There were several buildings, a few cabins with dogs tied up on the porch (I’m not kidding), lots of adventure gear (rafts, climbing stuff, mountain bikes) but no people. I called the outfitter again and told them that no one was there. After a few more minutes in the adventure ghost town, a car drove up and told us we were at the gear storage location… the main offices were another quarter mile up the road.

Time to Climb

Once we were at the right place, we got fitted with rock climbing gear. We all got helmets (which were way cool), harnesses (which looked very funny), and rock climbing shoes (which fit way tighter than normal shoes). Our climbing guides Cheyenne (a guy) and Jamie (a girl – you gotta love gender neutral names) taught us the finer points of climbing and belaying and let us have some fun on a 40 foot high slab of granite with 3 different climbing routes. Several of us even took up our guides offer to let us “free fall”… the guides gave us about 10 feet of slack in our lines as we jumped backwards away from the rock. That was a rush. (those crazy jumps are in the second video below).

There are so many amazing spiritual tie-ins with rock climbing, and most of them revolve around trust. Solo rock climbing is pretty dumb in that it’s one of the most dangerous activities I can imagine (swimming with hungry sharks has to take the cake), but climbing with a partner, proper gear, and using basic safety techniques makes rock climbing safer than crossing the street in Branson. Even with the boatloads of safety, there is an element of fear involved, and facing that fear is a bigger challenge for most new climbers than the physical challenge. As we follow Jesus, the most amazing parts of the journey involve risk, overcoming fear, and trusting Jesus. I could go on and on about how amazing climbing is, but tons of books have already been written about it. So here are a couple of video clips of our afternoon.

Rock Climbing Highlights – Part 1 (about 10 minutes long)

Rock Climbing Highlights – Part 2 (about 4 minutes long)

Don’t worry, the story about the lost keys is coming in Part 3 of this post in a few days.