These past 2 days have been intense for my group, and very accomplishing. We were the exercise group and we were true to our name.
The first day our group (Joe, Katie M, Max C, Kieran, and myself) started out by waking up at 5:00 in the morning and driving to the base of Mt. Lamborn, an intimidating 11’000 foot mountain, that we were gonna climb. I cannot say for sure the distance of the hike but trust me when I say it was difficult. We walked through swarms of yellow jackets, we walked through incredibly beautiful forests of different coloured aspens, we walked up steep gravel hills that slid beneath your feet, and eventually we made it to the top, where we looked down at the yellow and green colours of trees, and some of us could see Devs house.
At the top we found a storage cache of paper with names and notes on it for us to read and add to, so we ate lunch and looked though them, hoping to find people from last years gap year program, we did not find the gap year students but we did find the names and notes of Dev and Seraya, which is awesome because it kinda tells us that the notes that we all left are gonna stay for a while.
And then we headed back down, sliding down the gravel path and going down hill pretty much the entire way, almost halfing the time we took on the way up. Dev thought round trip would take 10 hours and we did it in 6 and a half!
We were whooped after that awesome day but we still had another full day ahead of us!
On the second day we drove to Ute trail head, which is a trail that leads to Gunnison river. Our challenge was to trail run it! We ran for around 2 miles with almost no stopping! Someone in our group started having some trouble with asthma so we went back up.
After the trail run, Blake and Ari showed us and had us try 3 different methods of splinting a sprayed ankle, which is one of the most common injuries on the trail.
This challenge was amazing and the feeling of accomplishment you get at the end of a day of exercise is something everyone should experience.