High Adventure, day 3

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Thursday was Rock Climbing. The Teachers and Priests packed up their stuff and headed for a three day (two night) back packing trip to the summit of San Gorgonio. We figured that might be a little aggressive for the young women and the younger deacons.

Steve Potter in our ward is a rock climber and so he has friends who are really into it and they were happy to work with our youth to show them the ropes (pun intended). Steve and Shana were there plus two other couples. Unfortunately I don’t remember their names.We drove our vehicles to the Pinnacles South parking lot and walked a couple of miles to the Pinnacles North parking lot which we used as our home base. Kyle Knaphus drove the kitchen crew and their food to the north parking lot in his four wheel drive vehicle.

We spent most of the day up there and ate lunch at the base camp. They had ropes anchored on three different rock faces. All of these were considered easy, but one was a bit more challenging. Most of the kids climbed at least once but a few didn’t want to try it. With a couple of exceptions, everyone who attemped a climb was successful although it took a few of them a very long time. All of the young womens presidency climbed, but Doug Bennion and myself were the only young men leaders who gave it a go.

While you know you are perfectly safe, you feel like you are clmbing this rock wall with no support. The rope is always slack so in your head you believe that if you slip, you are going to fall thirty feet to your death. At one point on the wall, you are on a smooth rock face with no hand holds. Fortunately the rock face is like sand paper and you wear special climbing shoes that have a smooth but soft sole. The sole sticks quite nicely to the rough surface, but it takes a lot of faith to put all your weight onto the toes of your shoes that are gripping a nearly vertical smooth surface and hope you will stick.

Personally, I had an extra challenge. There were no shoes my size, and when I asked one of the helpers if they had any size 12 shoes he told me where I could find a pair but he warned me that it had a hole in the toe. I figured I could live with that, so I put the shoes on and away I went up the rock.

I was fine until I got to the smooth face where you had to rely on the shoe sticking to the rock face. Because the face was nearly verticle, I could only use the toe of my shoe but unfortunately, my big toe was sticking out and I was trying to stick my bare toe to the sand paper like wall. I left a few layers of skin and blood on that rock face until I realized that I had to climb this face with only my left foot. There were no hand holds, so it was pretty tricky and slowed me down a lot. I was still fast enough that my pride didn’t take a big hit. I really didn’t want to be one of the slow people.

I made it to the top in a reasonable time, especially considering the fact that this was my first climb on a real rock face. In a gym you always have hand holds, but not on this rock. It was a ton of fun. In this last picture, Doug Bennion and I did a high five and made our macho pose. He climbed up the right side face and made it up right after me.

Anyone who wanted to was able to climb multiple times. From the Pinnacle we headed to the Alpine Slide.

The Alpine slide turned out to be more than just an Alpine slide. In addition to the Alpine Slide they also had, go carts, water slides, a mine shaft coaster, mini golf, a chair lift and in the winter a tubing hill. We picked the mine shaft coaster because it looked like the most bang for your buck. Everyone got to go once.

By the time we got back to camp everyone was exhausted. We did our devotionals, relaxed and got to bed early because Friday was our big backpacking trip. Fortunatley Bronwyn is a nurse and she cleaned the sand and gravel out of my big toe and bandaged it so I was all ready for the big hike.

--------------------trivia--------------------

The first recorded incedent of the term "buck" being used to describe a US dollar was in 1748. At that time a buckskin was common currency and had a value of roughly one dollar.

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