Memorial Day Weekend

So, for Memorial Day I was invited to go camping in Cleveland, UT with the Johnson family-- Tolon is the guy I'm sort of dating and his mom is my department chair at West Lake. Cleveland is East of Price and in the middle of nowhere-- seriously! Where we camped isn't even mapped by the BLM and doesn't have running water. We had a "poo tent" where the girls took care of business and the guys watered trees! What should have taken us only about 2.5 hours to get there took almost 7 hours due to a crash that closed Spanish Fork canyon for a while. We set up camp at 1:30 a.m. in freezing cold temperatures.
Saturday we went repelling-- so fun!! It's my new favorite thing to do in the mountains! I thought it would be scary walking backwards off a cliff, but really, it's pretty cool; it's all about trusting the rope (and the person on belay at the bottom!). Mark went down with me first to talk me through pulling the rope and stopping myself and Tolon was my belay-er. The hardest part was knowing that I could let my rope go and then stop when I wanted to. The second time I went down with Tolon-- a fun little bonding moment :)

Anyway. During the weekend we also went hiking, we saw the San Rafael Swell (the mini-Grand Canyon), found a dinosaur track, we saw Native American petroglyph s, explored some tunnels made by a NORAD underground nuclear blast (who decides to set off a bomb in sandstone??), went off -roading looking for the NORAD site, and had some great food (thanks Mark and Morgan!).

One of the main discussions we had involved the creation of The Man Scouts-- a variation of the Boy Scouts to allow for grown ups to do fun things like burn things up, light fireworks, get credit for making a Garage-ma-hal, a Man Cave, etc. We came up with rankings-- you start as a Teddy Bear Scout then move through Mini-Bear to Koala Bear to Panda Bear all the way up to the Kodiak Bear. To qualify to enter the Man Scouts, you have to be able to find Cleveland, UT.

On Monday Janice convinced me that guys like it when girls look pathetic and said we should try Tolon's three wheeler. She was able to do it and for some really ridiculous reason I thought I'd be able to do it do. lol. I ended up going too fast and crashed into a ditch and had the thing land on top of my ankle; it's a miracle I didn't die or break anything. I just ended up bleeding and bruised. So, the Johnson/Otteson family are some of the only people on earth who have seen me without makeup, bleeding and crying all at the same time. Due to my bravery and showing off of my wounds, I was awarded the first Man Scout Man-cheivement Award signed by Mark, Tolon and Arlo (the auxiliary of the Scouts). I'm so proud (sigh!)!