
With the 2nd night coming to a peaceful end, I was happy to finally leave the campfire and get some sleep. I was exhausted. The first field day had kicked my ass and I fell asleep quickly. I had a weird dream about being an Anasazi traveling around the mesas but I couldn't remember it clearly. I got another amazing night of sleep and I woke up in the morning completely refreshed. There was once again ice on my tent however day 3 was extremely cold. As I stepped outside my tent, there were no clouds above and the sun was still on its way over to our side of the sphere. I put every bit of clothing on I had and went and made breakfast again. Everyone in the camp was groggy because of the cold and darkness but as soon as the sun came up everyone came back to life.
Giving a presentation before we left
Angie showing us how to read a map
Before we embarked out on our trip, we did another preliminary stretch. While stretching, Angie and Cody went through our days schedule and it was not as intensive as the previous day. This day we were going to hike to the top of the comb ridge and catch some views. Then we would get lunch and go to a final site before leaving back to camp. I spent a great bit of effort stretching... I would need it. At about 8:00 a.m., we took off on our adventure.

We first traversed onto the comb regions sandstone. We hiked a few miles south and searched for a high ridge to scale up. Once we found one, we began hiking up. This is where all that stretching paid off. We were going straight up a sandstone mountain. I was not used to this kind of hiking at all for it was also very difficult. One slip, and your going to have a rough tumble down. This was pretty extreme. The whole time, I was thinking how the ancient puebloans pulled this off. The didn't have sophisticated hiking boots or adequate equipment. However they managed to pull it off like no problem. For us however, it was a challenge. When we got to what I thought was the top, was only half way. I was exhausted and scared because of how high we went. But we had to keep going. There was one more ginormous from the Lion King. This rock was huge and we were going straight up it. On the inside I didn't want to do this but I had to.
Jake showing the instructors a sweet view

What I thought would take 10 minutes ended up taking almost 30 minutes to scale this crazy thing. When we got to the top, it wasn't the top. There would be still another hour of hiking to get to a point that see's over the ridge. Angie and Cody had miscalculated the trek and said we would have to reach the top of the ridge from our 1st site of the day. Since we spent so much effort hiking, we decided to hang out and see the incredible view while eating lunch. It was awesome to be eating lunch in the 80 degree weather, while still seeing mountains all around use covered in snow. It was almost very spiritual being up there. It was as if the Anasazi were right there showing us what life was like years ago. It was a great feeling, however I wanted to get down! I was getting weazy being that high up.
Pride Rock was HUGE
Lunch at the top of pride rock
presentations at the top of pride rock

Instead of going down, we began scaling the comb ridge sideways. Yes sideways. Angie and Cody knew that it would be easier to get to our site if we stayed relatively high up. So that was what we did for the next hour. When we got to the canyon we needed to be in, we hopped in and began working our way up again. Eventually we would hit our next site. This place was covered in crumbled sandstone and was very hard to move around. However, this site was not an actual site where these people lived. This was a place strictly covered in rock art and pictographs. They were everywhere. The presence of these people really made their appearance at this site.




After we spent about an hour checking out the site, We decided to work our way up to the top of the ridge once again. I didn't think we would make it to the top because of what happened earlier. Sooner than later, we hit the top and my stomach dropped. I was speechless by what I was seeing. Everything could be seen from 360 degrees of view. We continued to hike to the tip top and when we reached the tip top, I got super freaked out. The top of the ridge had a straight drop down of like 2000 feet. One mistake up there would be the last of you. I kept good footing and ground. When we took our group picture, it was the highlight of the trip. This view really touched me and I could just feel the puebloans sitting right there next to us.


After we spent time on the top ridge, it was time to head home. I had learned so much on this trip... What a great way to celebrate everything we did over the few days. The hike down was hard but it was more depressing than anything. I didn't want to leave.
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