Where did my summer go?

You know that “Author blurb” I have at the bottom of each post? Where I describe myself as a “Scientist, rock climber, adventurista, crazy mom, and administrator of this blog?” Well, last month was devoted to science and mom, and not much of those other things. I had five presentations to give in less than four weeks, two conferences and a week of travel. The good news is, my real-life career seems to be doing well these days. The bad news is, we didn’t get out in the mountains as much as we wanted (or needed) to.

I had all of these awesome plans for Summer of Summits 2012, and we did manage to tick off a few little peaks, but we lost some momentum in the blur that was our August. Hopefully, we’ll make up some of that time in the few weekends of warm weather we have left this year!

Weeks gets taped up!

All is not hotel conference rooms and keynote presentations, though. We did get out for a couple of fun little climbing day trips, and I wanted to share some pictures from these.

We had a friend-of-a-friend, now a good friend, move into town in July. And to protect their privacy a tad, I’m going to give them the fun pseudonyms RockMomma and Charmed. If YOU would like a cool pseudonym, just ask! :)

Mark and I met RockMomma once maybe 10 years ago, when she was living in Chicago and we were in Indianapolis, and we all went on a climbing trip to the Red River Gorge together. None of us remember that meeting, of course.

RockMomma makes this climb look easy

These days, she and her family have moved to Northern Colorado, and we have been busy getting her and her daughter Charmed out to all of our favorite kid-friendly climbing areas.

Our little G-Man and Charmed have a ball when they get together. They spend hours running and laughing and hitting things with sticks. It makes climbing so much easier and more fun than the days of intensive baby care last summer.

G-Man and Charmed spent a lot of time “climbing” this rock

We took HiTruck (long story), RockMomma and Weeks (our mutual friend) up to Vedauwoo for a day at the end of July, taped them up and set them loose on a couple of off-widths. Even though this is not exactly everybody’s cup of tea climbing-wise, we all had a fun day.

Girls are ready to go!

On the first weekend in August, Mark and I took advantage of RockMomma’s Jeep to drive right up to Punk Rock. We ticked off 5 fun pitches that day, and climbed until our fingertips screamed.

Kate cleaning the anchors while everybody plays below

So, there is four weeks of science, family, sun, rocks, mountains, clouds and giggles in one blog post. I can’t wait to see what this fall has in store for us!