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  Pike's Peak -- September 5-8, 2002

Sorry, I didn't get this to all of you sooner, but my month has been very crazy.

Pike's Peak was a very different retreat then any of the others, and you can't really compare it to any of the others for it was far too different. This was the only retreat that we had to prepare for; we prepared for 1 month and I personally had been preparing for even longer. I was running a lot, I built up to 5 mile runs, and believe me I needed every single step of all our training.

It will be the only retreat that is not done on campus, it is done a mere 18 hour bus ride away in Colorado Springs. We left around midnight and then arrived around 6 the next evening. Most of that time was spent traveling through Texas, we crossed into New Mexico between 10-12am; the ride was mainly sleeping, the reason is it was so uncomfortable on the bus and so bouncy, loud and cramped that any sleep you had didn't really make you energized but rather made the time pass more quickly. I played some spades, black-jack and ERS with some of my friends; that helped to pass the time along with praying and reading the Bible. Note to anyone who wants to drive cross country,… don't drive across New Mexico, or Texas it is a very boring ride that don't have much change, just flatness.

We got to Colorado Springs and stayed in a hotel for 2 night and 3 days, it was fun we got to go around town one of those days and shop, eat and all that good stuff. It was fun to hang out with my roommates, my core and my sister core. The night before we climbed, we met with our teams for a meeting. There were nine travelers that hiked that mountain, when we set off we thought it wouldn't beat us,... some were wrong… other right; no matter what Brooke, Nick, Erica, Justin, Andy, Arthur, Kelly, Sarah and Ashley were determined to get to the top!

The next morning the wake up call was 3am, we loaded the busses at 3:15 at 3:30 we were climbing the mountain. The first 3 miles were pretty easy, everyone was doing fine. We got half-way to the middle of the second 3 miles and we took a wrong turn that took us about 1.5 miles out of the way, which means a total of 3 miles before we were back on track. There were plenty of other travelers on the mountain, some old men put us ALL to shame just running up and down the mountain passing us and only carrying about half the water that we were; it made me SICK!

So we made we were the second to last group to get into Barcamp (the half-way mark) and we rested for close to an hour, at this point 5 of us were feeling the 9 miles that we had walked and asthma, attitude, sore legs plagued them so they decided to stay back. So Justin, Brooke, Erica and I continued our hike at 8:30am and we went and continued our trek. It became warm as the sun was beating on our backs, and we carried what seemed to be VERY heavy backpack the last 6 miles of the mountain. Once we hit A-Frame, which is the 3 miles from the top it is the point at which we persevere more then the mighty pines that call home Pike's Peak, the air becomes thin, the wind harsher and the sun hotter; though it was a very nice day for hiking the mountain. Those last 3 miles were very hard, you could see both the top and the path to it; and the path to the top wasn't a straight line but a bunch of switchbacks which was annoying cause it seemed like you were going nowhere fast. But we walked and walked and walked, and we drank our water and dumped out anything that would decompose and we walked more and more. When we finally got to the top I thought I was going to puke, but nope I fell asleep on gravel for about 10 min then we took pictures and celebrated at 14,110 feet! Woohoo! Well there is not much to tell about afterward we left the next morning at 5am and got back around 12, the trip was much like the first.