Joshua Tree

The day after school ended for the kids, we decided to take them out to Joshua Tree to celebrate and get a bit of climbing in. It was a perfect day out. The weather was still fairly mild and the park was not very crowded.

Since we have not had a lot of opportunity to work on our climbing for quite a while now, we decided to stay conservative and not climb anything too hard since we are out of shape and out of practice.

We got into the park to get our passes and we stopped by the Nomad Ventures just to see what was new and try on some of the new climbing shoes that have come out. The shoe we were looking for Emily to try did not really fit her and they did not have very many sizes to choose from, but we found a really awesome deal on a clearance shoe that fit her perfectly and ended up leaving with it. We were only looking to see the fit of the new shoes to consider for Christmas, but I guess Christmas comes early for Emily this year.

We then headed out to the Belle Campground area to climb on Castle Rock. Our first climb was supposed to be Diagnostics 5.6. It should have been well within our ability, however, we could not get past the first 10 feet. The start of routes is usually not taken into consideration in the rating of of a route and has been a source of much frustration. Christian and Emily tried several unsuccessful times to get onto the route but in the end, we had to abandon it as they were getting their hands all scratched and cut up from the rock.

Christian also had to work on a big school project to do and found a way to incorporate some filming in Joshua Tree for it, so we stopped and got some footage for that before eating our lunch. Afterwards, we moved over to climb Diabetics 5.4. That was a much easier fun little climb for us but it was hard to shake off the bad taste left by our defeat on Diagnostics.

When we were done, we drove around for a bit, looking at some areas that we have not been in. The kids got some practice driving around, especially Emily. She's starting to get much more comfortable and is able to relax more on her practice runs.

We ended up at the Ryan Campground. We went in search of a 5.5 route called Barely Crankin on Manure Pile. When we got to the right area, we did not bring our book to double check the route. We just climbed the most obvious gully, thinking that that was where we were supposed to be at. 

It was a fairly fun, easy climb with a little squeeze chimney at the top. Christian really liked that part. I could have done without it. We later found that we were actually, to the left of the actual route, so the kids established our new route as Dutch Doll Gutter 5.4.

By the time we were done cleaning up at the route, the sun was starting to set, so we called it a day. We took a short walk to look at another route that we plan to do soon.

It was a pretty low key, relaxing day. We all had a great time. It was nice to get out again.

May Overview

At the beginning of the month, Emily had to go take her SATs. Caitlyn went with the youth early in the morning to the Temple.

It only took a couple of weeks or so to get her results back. She did pretty good. She got 1350. Hopefully that will help her get into college.

For Mother's Day, the family seemed to stick with an "iron" theme as I got a waffle iron and an actual iron for clothes. I had mine since high school and it finally died. It was either made fairly well or it just proves that I didn't use mine that often over the years!

We went to visit with my mom for Mother's Day. We did our usual potluck but not a picnic since the weather has still been cool and wet. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures hardly at all this past month.

Beyond that, the kids spent most of their time finishing their school projects and getting ready for finals. The school year ends at the end of the month.

Luckily, Emily was able to pick up some of her grades at the last minute. She ended up with not great, but decent grades. Caitlyn was stressed out about her final grades. She was getting straight A's up until finals and it got a little dicey until the teachers got all the assignments put in. She ended up with straight A's for her fourth quarter grades but still had one B+ for her overall last semester. I don't know if she realizes it yet. I don't really want to be the one to tell her. She will be so disappointed.

Christian is still doing great in school. He passed the first part of his TPAs and is in the middle of two master's classes. He also found out that he will not be teaching Chemistry after all at his new school in the fall but will be teaching Physics instead...which is fine except that he spent a good deal of time preparing to teach Chemistry already.

Emily was supposed to be working on getting her driver's license, but she had found out that not only does she have to take a useless online class for it, but also has to pay some instructor for at least 6 hours of behind the wheel instruction. We kept going back and forth on the decision on whether to bother with that or not since it costs a great deal of money. I think we finally decided to just wait until she is 17 and a half so that we don't need to have her do any of that.