Ahhhhh.... What a life these two have :-)
"The Chronicles of Atlas and Mo"
There were times during this climb that I was scarred I was going to slip and every time I made a "nervous" noise Mo came running right to my side. Not sure what she thought she was going to do but hey.... she was protective of me :-)
We tried getting up this peak but it was too steep for the dogs and it turned into legitimate rock climbing at that point. Not happening and we found made a new route :-)
I swear Mo is part Mountain Goat because she made it look effortless. Just frolicking through the flowers and tall grass along the mountain. At some points she as vertical almost 90 degrees and still ran all over the place. Atlas on the other hand made me nervous at times. She weighs more than me and liked to stand infront of me to rest. If he falls I fall :-)
My lady!!!! Charlie, If you read this, thank you for the wonderful addition to our family - Now you can tell all your your friends that Mo is a mountain climber!
Best Friends!!!
Still climbing ridges with Hannah! Obligatory "Peace Sign" photo
Yep.... No denying the majestic scenery
Mountains as far as the eye can see!
Need to stop and catch my breath! Hannah keeps telling to go higher while we almost die - Of course Mo is not tired!
To put things into perspective - that peak directly below me (above picture) is the peak where all of the "posed" photos were taken. It does not look like that much further way but when we traversed that ridge to the next peak, we went that much higher. And yes.... Most of this so called "hike" was a climb on all fours.
Made it! Only to realize that the dogs were unable to go higher due to the gradient. Remember how I said we "made" our own path or found our own way... This was the way... EMBRACE THE SUCK! We literally skied down these rocks in between two peaks and prayed for survival :-) Not really, but it was nerve racking because we were going blindly.
We didn't take any more pictures after getting down this rock valley because it was too risky at that point. We needed to focus on getting off the mountain the safest way possible because we never made it to the trail like we had planned.
We basically trekked through the "jungle" - To lighten the anxiety we kept cracking jokes and referring to the jungle terrain of the Sakhalin mountains as the jungles in Vietnam and referencing Jack Sparrows awesome navigational skills.
Anything to take away the scare factor of "We are lost" or "the dogs are not safe". But then we found a partially cleared out path. Mo led the way and led us straight to the water creek that ran through the mountain. We followed it all the way down and and made it out.
This little adventure took roughly 2 1/2 hours and we went through all sorts of yucky things. I walked right through a spider web and the 8 legged monster was on me. Not a happy kid but my options were either deal with it or freak out and get hurt. I choose freak out and ended up falling :-)
We got out and rested for a bit then headed back up the mountain the correct way with Will and the kids
My nature buddy! Hannah! And Mo of course!
Lets back track a bit for a second...... I just acquired more pictures from Beth's camera of the beginning of our climb and really do not want to rewrite the post to make it flow so lets go back shall we...
Here is the Mountain we climbed with the path's layed out. Light Blue is what Hannah and I took and pink path is the legitimate trail and what we took with the Will & kids.
The picture earlier in this post of me skiing down some rocks is the section where the dogs could not get up. We made an alternate route to get back down.
These two pictures are the start of the climb - THE WRONG WAY UP! Well...... We saw people climbing this way and though we looked for the proper way up, we never found it so this was the way I guess. However, had we waited and not jumped the gun, we could have gone with the rest of the group. But no..... two headstrong females did not want to wait and I abandoned my husband on the beach with three kids to look after and said those fateful words that every husband loves to hear...."I wont be long, I promise" - Bold faced lie! :-)
And we are still trucking.....In one of these pictures where it is mostly rock, I got stuck. Everytime I grabbed on to a boulder, pieces kept chipping away and I would lose grip. Took quite a bit of time to get up this initial part.
One thing that I took away from this is that I will NOT be the next American Ninja Warrior.
This was such a fun experience and can't wait to do it again!
Stay tuned for part 3 ~ Fry kids become climbers!
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