Maple Canyon with the Boys

This last weekend our awesome friends the Smiths came into town from Phoenix to visit. We used the occasion as an excuse for the guys to get together for some camping, jeeping and climbing -- or as someone I was telling about the trip put it, "A bunch of has-beens trying to go out and re-live their youth." Yeah, that about sums it up.

So Friday afternoon we piled in the jeeps and took off to Maple Canyon, a canyon renowned for its unique rock structures.



The camping was swell, the Jeeping was adventurous, and the climbing was exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of desk jockeys, few of which have even touched the rock in the last 2 years.







Among the much heckling, ribbing and harassment, we managed to even throw a practical joke into the mix. Let me start this by stating a rule that every good scout should know: 'On a campout don't ever be the first to sleep or the last to wake up.'

Now, as a prelude to our story, let me provide some background. A couple years ago in Moab, we had a supposed raccoon sighting from Zane. To this day he swears a raccoon was climbing around in the Jeep while he slept. There wasn't. But, since he was so convinced, and still a bit scared by the incident, we decided to have a little more fun this year. I brought along our stuffed mink (don't ask why we have a stuffed mink) with the intention of messing with Zane a bit. Turns out, Zane stumbled onto the mink in the middle of the night, so we couldn't do much with it, and we missed out on the fun of seeing him run into this thing at 3am, groggy with sleep. That would've been fun.

We were disappointed. Then we noticed there was a late sleeper with us... Mr. Lonnie Corbridge. We delicately placed the mink about an inch from his face and sat back to wait for the fun. We weren't disappointed. When he woke up, he sorta jumped, wriggled and swatted all at the same time. While we were all over by the fire, getting a good laugh at his expense, he was trying to figure out what was going on...







At the end of the day, we all had a great time and got to reconnect with friends.



Looking forward to 2010 guys trip somewhere....