hey there... thought i'd let you know that hardcore person that i am, i one-upped the ranger marathon the other day.... so tehre is this thing called the cons challenge that goes from the top of little costilla (which is in the valle vidal --the land above philmont that belongs to a national foresst that philmont contreacts the use of) to line camp (the absolute southernmost part.. it doesnt exist).. the whole thing is 75 miles and you have to carry a conservation tool...

because of timing and everythingn (we were suppose to leave early in the day so we could summit and then relax before we started) we cut off costilla, but we hiked from shuree ponds which is only about a mile south of tehre... then we hiked about 60 miles to abreu (the southern most camp that still has staff at it.) so it was longer than the ranger marathon but not quite cons. we carried 35 lbs which is the requirement for teh ranger marathon. and we did it in 19 hours 42 minutes (including a one hour nap and lunch in base camp).

it was pretty hard and my feet hurt a bit.

some crazy stuff happened to us too... i hiked with this girl kieran from california... she was pretty cool. but anyway, she is kind of paranoid about running into a mountain lion (she was stalked walking down the urracca mesa.) so basically all night (we started at 830pm so we hiked a lot in the night) she was thinking that they were around... so we talked loudly about the most inane things for the vast majority of the night to scare tehm away... at about 2 am were were watched by one hiking along the ponil road. so we sang to it... the 12 days of christmas and the ranger song... the only things we could remember the words to. at about 4 am we were delerious from lack of sleep and talking and hiking so we stopped to take a nap... we were at chandler canyon where peopel that work at dean cow keep there cars. we tried a couple of doors and someone had left there car unlocked so we slept inside of it for an hour. (they had a fleece blanket and everyhting!) it was awesome... we were totally refreshed after the nap that the rest of the day went pretty smoothly... we even stopped into base to eat lunch... a whole bumch of poeple we saw were really confused that we were there... they thought that we had given up--not that we were taking a break...

thats about the most of hte crazy stuff i have done... i'm having a blast and i'm meeting great people... its going to be too bad when it ends... i actually have no idea what i'm doing when my contract ends... i'm filling out info on job websites as i write this.