The climb up Quandary got off to a dazzling start to say the least. The night before my friend John, who was beaming with excitement about the trip and had been talking about it for months, sent everyone a text message to remind us of the meeting time and place, 5:30 am at the church. The next morning a couple of us arrived around 5:20. 5:30 rolls around and a few more had shown up. When Kyle arrived, though, there was ample evidence that John wasn’t even conscious yet. For the half hour before Kyle showed up, he was calling John’s cell phone continuously with no answer. Then we found out that John went to a late showing of ‘Prince Caspian’ the night before. Kyle adamantly tried to persuade John not to go to the movies the night before, but John went anyway. Eventually as 6 am approached, the seven of us who were at the church piled into two vehicles, then headed over to John’s house to wake him up. When we arrived at his house there was another member of the group sitting in his vehicle. Mike had been there knocking on the door for an hour with no answer. Adding to the craziness of the situation, one of the guys started throwing rocks at John’s window. What eventually woke John up he doesn’t even know, but we found out that he fell asleep right at the top of his stairs. Lol, no one gave him any slack the whole way to the mountain.

The mountain was nice that day too. I ended up taking the lead and going off ahead of everyone. I hadn’t planned to leave them behind that day; but when I was ahead of everyone all by myself, I felt peaceful.