Fairbanks Funtimes

There's nothing quite like coming home.

Especially when your mom has a beautiful, massive garden that looks like a fairy wonderland. And delicious garden produce to go with it.

I like playing in the dirt. So I helped Mom pull rhubarb, thin the carrots (some of which were crazy big), pick beans and peas, and pull weeds.

There were a lot of movie nights, some Cards Against Humanity (Mom kept destroying us. I'm not sure if I should be concerned about that), a run from Angel Rocks to Chena Hotsprings (8.7 miles of super steep, hilly hell) that had lots of blueberries to distract us, a weekend with Tae, time with my parents, and a trip to the dentist. Ok, that last one wasn't great, but everything else was.

I also climbed. A lot. The boys (well, Nick, Jesse, sometimes Dakota, and Angie ( who is not a boy)) climb Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7am. Normally we would skip out to climb at Grapefruit, but the weather has not been cooperating this summer and it kept raining on us. So we climbed inside.

Then the forecast gave us hope. Friday it was supposed to be sunny. And lo and behold, it was. So to Grapefruit we went.

Nick hadn't been back since the end of April, when a hold broke and he took a wicked, unroped ground fall. Partially, his prolonged absence was due to the fires that socked in the crags and he decided to take up ultra running. Like a badass.

Anyway, because we went out with Nick, we had a Janssen. No surprise there. He wanted to measure how far he actually fell, so we hiked up to Twin Towers (holy crap, an actual approach! It has been so long!), had a bit of a cluster figuring out how best to mark the rope, and sent Nick up to face his fears.

This. He fell off this.

Fyi, the hold that blew out was the size of a small microwave.

Of course, it didn't go according to plan. The rope got caught around a big bolder when he tried to throw it down to rappel, and continued to wedge itself in the more we flipped it. Eventually there was some creative leading to free the rope, following to clean the gear, and the boys pulled the rop from the top and walked off. The Janssen lasted almost 2.5 hours and was just a tad sketchy.

In case you were wondering, he fell 52 feet.

Then we hiked over the hill to Beggar's Canyon. We were treated to a stunning view of the burns, White Mountains, and the vast wilderness that makes me love Alaska. Find me a view like this anywhere else (ok, you can get similar from most mountains, but this is so close to town it's kind of ridiculous) and I will consider spending lots of time there. Maybe not live there, since Alaska has my heart, but temporarily.

And so we climbed. We lead some new (to us) routes, then had some creative top rope anchor setting. It's probably a good thing we're all engineers, and the conundrum was solved safely with lots of redundancy thanks to Jesse's brilliance.

The day had everything needed for a perfect climbing trip: a Janssen, creative problem solving, and a little bit of blood. Ok, the blood was because I accidentally scratched the scab off my nose, but Nick stuck a band-aid on it and it was good. Messy, but good.

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So now I'm back in the Netherlands, sans Ev. I have classes starting this week (boo), some stuff to finish up from last quarter so I'm done with Soil Dynamics (yay extra homeworks), and a few hours of work for my research assistantship I need to put in.

It's going to be a busy year.