Shift 6 and a birthday bash

After five shifts with “adult boys”, I spent my sixth shift with eight adolescent girls. Needless to say it was different and probably my most challenging week thus far. I saw more tears in the first 2 hours than I have in the five previous shifts. It was an emotion fest and many of these girls were master manipulators! While I have worked with adolescent girls in tough situations from the inner city of DC to a detention center in AL, this was different. That said, good things happened this week, and I learned and grew.

In the front country, I headed to Red Rocks for a birthday bash. Two friends from St George and some of their friends from Flagstaff share a late March birthday. They have a tradition of celebrating in Red Rocks. So, we had worlds colliding as friends and friends of friends come together for climbing, bluegrass around a camp fire, and even a little bit of March madness.


This is Chuckwalla, our "climbing gym". With daylight savings time, we were able to get in a session this past Tuesday as we came out of the field.


Wednesday morning breakfast. On the right in the picture below are Gillian and Dafnah, my two best non-climbing friends. They keep me balanced.



The wind was so bad, we didn't last too long. I convinced the others to sit with me while I watched the UNC v Marquette basketball game. There is a tendency for outdoorsy folks to have little to no interest in traditional sports. I am working hard to enlighten this population!



Ginger Cracks, 5.9, 7 pitches. We only made it to the third due to the cold. Considering that it was snowing when we started and the others only made it half way up their first pitch, I don't feel too badly about bailing.



We finally got some nice weather on Sunday and did some party climbing.



The birthday bash group photo (minus Paul and Zach).