Headless Chickens

I have been a major slacker about posting, so I may end up writing a lot. Steve and I are still here in Provo working on getting our bachelor's degrees. The good new is we finish in April!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We really can't wait to get out of Provo. We've decided that for our graduation gift to ourselves we're going to go on a backpacking trip. We don't know where yet, but we're going. In preparation for this I've been taking several classes with the Recreation department. The first class I took was a canyoneering class. For those of you who don't know what canyoneering is, it's basically hiking through a slot canyon. Canyons can range in difficulty from a simple hike, up to swimming in potholes and rappelling off large cliffs. The potholes are really cold so there is a risk of drowning. We learned enough to do canyons with some water and rappelling. The highest cliff I rappelled off of was about 90 ft. It was a bit scary, but so much fun. I really want to do some canyoneering again.
This semester I took basic backpacking and wilderness trek. The backpacking class was fun. We went up north to the Uintas on a three day trip. We stayed at a lake called Hell Hole. My teacher picked that particular location because she wanted an excuse to say hell as much as possible. The first day we hiked to the lake. The second day a few of us hiked up a ridge. It was steep and really tiring, but well worth the effort. We saw a mountain goat and the view was gorgeous. The trees in the area were all changing colors and you could see a few lakes in the area. The trip down was hard on the toes and now one of mine is purple.
My wilderness trek class was more of a survival class. We learned how to make a fire by friction ( i haven't gotten that to work yet), build traps, build a shelter, and start a fire by flint and steel. We had our trip for that class this last weekend. We went to Little Sahara. We didn't even get there until 9:30 Thursday night. We were told to get out of the cars with nothing but a coat, water, a pocket knife. We were going to hike a ranger mile. A ranger mile can be any distance long or short. Ours happened to be 8 miles. Luckily our group went pretty fast. Most of Friday was spent demonstrating our projects. We barely had any food the whole day so it was quite tiring. For dinner we were informed that we would have to kill a chicken. If we didn't want to help kill it that was fine, but we couldn't eat it. We were in groups of three. One person had to hold the feet, another had to hold the head down, and another had to cut the head off. I got to hold down the head. Chickens do run around a bit after their heads are chopped off. Actually they flop over and get back up on their feet a few times until they've bled out. It's really weird to see. Sorry if I grossed any of you out. After that we got to clean the chicken and I thought that was pretty interesting to where all the parts go. After dinner we spent 24 hours on our own. That evening I just built my shelter and went to bed. The next morning I woke up to snow. Luckily my sleeping bag was rather warm. It warmed up later on and I fixed up my shelter. I must say, it was a sweet shelter.
So those are my exciting outdoor classes. Steve and I have done a bit on our own. We hiked around Bryce Canyon at the end of April and hiked overnight on Mt. Nebo over the 4th of July weekend. That was about all the fun we had over the summer. We both took classes and worked. We did get to visit my family in Michigan during the month of August. We all stayed in a house on Lake Michigan for a few days. It was pretty fun.
Aside from school and work, I'm getting ready for GRE's and grad school applications while Steve looks for jobs. Were somehow trying to find a way for me to get into a school somewhere where Steve can get a job. We'll see how well that works out.
That's about all for me. Sorry the post is so long. I will try to be more consistent in writing so that future posts will be shorter.

~Laura