On top of the world, looking up

So the day after my last "adventure," I had a minor mishap while gardening. I know, seriously, who gets injured gardening... I mean, what's the worst you can do; blisters on your hand from the shovel, a sunburn perhaps? How about put a hole in your foot about a half inch in diameter? Now how in the world, you might say, do you manage that in a safe, friendly garden? Well, I am my mother's daughter (sorry Mom, it needed to be said), and my roommate is a blossoming woodsmen. He buried a deer skull in our yard and in my haste to attack the weeds I forgot about it and sort of stomped on the antlers. Not to worry, however, two weeks later and I'm up and at em, looking for those adventures, and a bit sore today from my most recent one.

I spent Sunday with those same lunatic engineering friends, this time climbing, crawling, scrambling, and sliding around a local rock climbing site known as Frog Rock for the frog-like shape one of the larger protrusions. However we weren't exactly rock climbing; we were looking for a cave rumored to be somewhere around the top of Frog Rock. As a novice climber and newbie adventurer, I'd never been to the site before, so both the view and the hike were new to me. The approach is about a half-mile long, nearly vertical path requiring a lot of crawling and assistance from nearby rocks and trees. After crawling through a rocky crag to a halfway point, past the first few bolted climbing routes, my four comrades had two different ideas about how to reach the cave and set off in pairs in opposite directions leaving me to choose who to follow. Since I was already closer them, I followed Simon and Eric.

Perhaps, in retrospect, this was not the wisest choice since they make up the slightly crazier half of the group. They warned me that they didn't know if their path would even work, but I'm nothing if not stubborn and I resisted their attempts to let me escape. We walked, crawled and climbed up the ridge, at times only a few feet wide, and reached one of the highest points only to realize we were above the cave and were subsequently forced to backtrack to find a route down. At one point we came to a gap that was too far to walk or jump across and had to climb about eight feet down a blind ledge and back up the other side.

We found the cave and explored a bit. The first couple "rooms" were big enough to stand in leading off into smaller sections and even a short tunnel leading into another small "room". After nearly trapping myself in a snow tunnel as a kid I'm not so fond of tight spaces, so I enjoyed the sun while the boys got muddy digging deeper into small tunnels in search of more rooms. Eventually we braved the steep downhill back to the car, sliding and slipping much of the way down. Between clambering around the rocks and bushes in shorts, and a short fall on the way down, my legs look like I tried to Indian leg-wrestle a bobcat, but damn it was fun. There are a some pictures posted in the "adventures" album. None of me, as I had the camera most of the time. Well, back to work, I'm supposed to be writing a manuscript... oops.