1st Trad Climb

I went on my first trad climb with Chad last Saturday and it was amazing!  I must have been too excited and couldn't sleep till around 2:30 and had to wake up at 5:20 so I was pretty nervous that I'd have no energy, but I was so excited I had plenty of energy.  It was 4 pitches between 5.7 and 5.9+.  It was so cool to step into this world where all of the sudden the untouchable in the mountains becomes doable.  I hope I get more opportunities to climb more this summer!  1st trad climb, 1st multi pitch climb, and first rappel.  The first rappel was a little scary at first!

Twins via Ferguson

Last week Aaron and I went up to the Broad Fork Twins from Ferguson.  It was new to both of us and it was a really fun route! Great views into Deaf Smith and Stairs.

Before that I did the Castle Traverse again, and a sweet evening night run up at Alta/Snowbird with awesome wild flowers and tons deer and moose!

Castle Traverse and one St. George picture

Snowbird/Alta peak loop 16 miles 5K

Lone Peak, up Big Willow, down Cherry Canyon and BST

Aaron made a goal to summit all 33 peaks in the Wasatch that you can summit starting from the valley and then try to ski down them this winter.  We decided it was a good day for Lone Peak last week.  Aaron had never gone up Big Willow and I had never been down Cherry Canyon so we decided to make a loop of it.  We started around six and I was pleasantly surprised to find the trail a lot less overgrown than last year, probably because it is earlier in the year but it also looked like some work had been done on the trail.  We made our way up to the Notch in the Big Willow headwall.  From the valley it looked like it might still have snow in it and it did.  The snow hadn't refrozen and we didn't have anything with us to go up the snow anyways so we decided to climb around.  It was actually a lot better climbing on the rock than on the breakable crap that fills the notch.  There was one move that Aaron didn't feel comfortable about the hand hold or maybe just couldn't find the same one I had found so I down climbed and we did a little foot belay.  The peak was awesome as always, such amazing views and a great journey up there.  Going down Bear and Cherry Canyon was really sweet.  Way better than the desertness of Jacob's Ladder up until the last couple miles.  The "easy two" miles on the BST back to our cars in the 100 degree heat was brutal!  All in all another great day on Lone Peak.  As a side note this week marks my most productive running week to date, 53.1 miles with 15,095 feet of vertical!  Next weekend we will be in St. George but my goal the following week is to run over 20 miles in one outing (two 17 miles runs with 5K vert the last two weekends) and to get 60 miles for the week with 20,000 vert.

Some other recent running pictures

Avery also got her first bike