We have officially completed our first full week on the trip! Today was another very warm day for Colorado. And everyone was offsite for work projects or adventures! Eighteen students hiked up Byers Peak. The rest of us split between three different locations for work projects.

Let’s start by hearing from two of the hikers about their adventure!

Today was a very exciting day😆! We hiked Byers mountain which is a 10 mile hike with an evaluation gain of 3,000 feet! About half of the students went on this hike and we woke up at 6:20am 🥱 and started hiking at 7:45am and finished at 3:30pm. We spilt the mountain up into 3 groups. First, the gravel trail, second was the trees, and last was the tree line . The tree line was 100% the hardest part of the whole hike. We had to climb up huge false peeks and our legs were glad for us to finish that part of the hike. We ate lunch at the top of the mountain and it was beautiful. It was so amazing to look over God’s gorgeous creation and feel so accomplished. Instead of hiking down the tree line many people slid down the snowy mountain tops🏔️. We hiked down the rest of the mountain and were very grateful when we saw the vans that drove us back to Timberline. Overall this was an amazing experience that I would not do tomorrow but would definitely do in a few month after some emotional and physical recovery. Also just a note to all you parents: no one was injured!😜 -Grace Sell

The road up to the trail is the hardest part of the trip 3 miles of 30 dagger angal road It was mentally tiring. In the end the tree line felt much more enjoyable. It was hard physically not mentally. The snow in our shoes was annoying. – Miles 

And now for some insider info from today’s work projects.
Don’s: After we got to Don’s and met him and his wife and their grandkids, we went to work putting the split wood into wheelbarrows. Some of our group helped Don cut the bigger pieces of wood with the wood splitter. The kids were such a big help they helped us stack wood. The animals were very cute. We made sure that we took lots of water breaks and breaks in general because of the heat. At Don’s, there were a few injuries, we had 2 bloody noses (from Kate and Leyla), scrapes, and sunburns. They told us stories about their lives (Don fought in the Vietnam War). They were very kind and welcoming. I enjoyed working with them. – Annika Doerksen and Leyla Perkins

Trail: Today we worked on creating burn piles which are logs we stack up to create teepees. We started with small sticks to create a foundation and slowly kept adding bigger sticks. We made thirteen piles while we were there. It was very hard work and I definitely got scraped up but looking at the teepees after was very rewarding! – Lila Swedlund