SurviVAIL - Mt. Massive

Sorry for all the Vail puns.  :D

I didn't get the job I talked about in my last post. I was really frustrated for a while because I had wasted a week and a half interviewing and waiting for the company because they had made it sound like I was hired for sure.

Last weekend the project split up and we had Men's and Women's weekends. The men drove an hour south of Vail through beautiful terrain and through Leadville, the highest city in the US (at 10,500 feet above sea level, twice as high as Denver). Here's a picture of Leadville.

We camped that night. The next morning we got up at 6, ate breakfast and made lunch and set out to climb Mt. Massive. Yeah, that's really what it's called. It's the third tallest mountain in the lower 48, and more than 14,400 feet high. It was an insanely awesome and hard climb.

It started off through a steep staircase-like rock formation. The whole thing was steep actually. We all started off together on the climb but we slowly started to spread out as we got higher. The staff who had all climbed mountains like this before pulled ahead. I was surprised the staff wasn't sticking with us students but now thinking back it was pretty cool that they left us to climb and test ourselves against the mountain without their support. As we got higher, we'd take breaks for 3 or 4 minutes to catch our breath in the thin air and let our muscles rest. But in just like 15 steps after the break, we'd be back to breathless.

Finally, the ridge was close. The last climb to the ridge was the most memorable to me. It was still early morning and this part of the mountain was in the shade. The ground was covered in loose rock that slid down when ever you took a step. It was impossible to walk up... so we crawled. Finally you would reach your arm over the edge and emerge into the sun and see the high plain below and the other mountains all around. Supposedly, you could see for 150 miles from the top. The wind there was insanely strong and cold. From here it was just a short hike to the peak. It was an amazing experience.

The descent was a hard too, but really fun. The huge patches of snow which had been so hard to traverse where now our way down. We sat on our packs or rain jackets or just our butts and slid hundreds of meters down. When we got to the bottom, we are all exhausted. All of us slept for a few hours and woke up with killer headaches because of altitude sickness.


On Monday I applied at McDonalds and Taco Bell and I got a call back that night for an interview on Thursday with McDonalds. Yesterday, a few of us helped clean the ski trails on Vail Mountain. We took a gondola to the top of the mountain. While cleaning up we found some pretty sweet stuff. Ski's, cellphones (some still worked), and a snowboard. They provided free lunch and a free lift ticket for this winter. Today I got a call from a guy who goes to our local church here. He's a photographer that another guy on project is working for. Aaaaaaaaaaand, I'm going to work with them tomorrow! Wooohoo! God provides.