The Cliffs Of Insanity

Oh man, the fact that I'm just now getting around to writing about my adventure last Friday is enough to indicate how busy I've been.

I went rock climbing. Climbing up a rock. Like, physically going up a wall of rock. Ohhhh yeah.

I was pretty excited because I love a good adventure and I'm willing to try most anything once. My co-worker Carla, her husband Matt, and brother-in-law Josh were all there and it was intense (not unlike camping). We hiked up to the top of the rock and figured out the ropes, both figuratively and literally. The idea was to rappel down and then climb back up. Since they're all seasoned pros, they were asking me stuff like, "So are you afraid of heights?" Followed, of course, by nervous laughter and "Um, not too afraid, I guess." In reality I was thinking, You want me to go down that? With just a rope and a harness? Whoa, let's not get ahead of ourselves. The cars down there are practically the size of the plastic cars from The Game of Life. I haven't passed the marriage space or bought a log cabin or cured the common cold or had twins yet! What about the twins?! I believe Joey from Full House summed it up best when he said, "Cut. It. Out!"

But I'm no quitter, so down the cliff I went. There was a minor freak-out of WHERE DO I PUT MY FEET, but I bravely overcame. Consensus: Rappelling rocks. (Pun.) Once you get the rhythm down, it's so much fun. I imagine it looked something like this:


Then came the real challenge--getting back to the top. Carla let me borrow her shoes. Très kind! I only made it about halfway up and stayed there hugging the cliff in a manner that church leaders tell us young Mormon kids to never, ever do to the opposite sex. But for my first attempt at rock climbing, I felt extremely good about myself.

Also, I learned tons of new jargon. Did you know that "leading" is when you climb up and attach your rope to the bolts as you go? Because people need to make scaling large slabs of rock even more dangerous.


But wait! There's more! The best part of the evening was when we decorated paper maché heads of one another, à la Michael Scott in the Halloween episode of The Office. (Pictures shamelessly taken from Carla.)

Honest, I do not look this fake-baked EVER. We ran out of white, so there was improvisation involved.

In case you can't tell, Josh's eyes have glitter in them. I thought it was a nice touch. He also looked more like a Muppet than I intended.

The pre-maché materials. Rather genius, don't you think?

As they say in the rock business, "Once you go slack, you never go back!" Or maybe I just made that up. Whatever. It was a blast and I'm determined to make it to the top at some point in my life. Young Gretchen would have never tried climbing and rappelling, but Fancy New Gretchen is all over that stuff.