Challenge Course 4 at Heber Valley, Utah

I can't believe it! I'm in Salt Lake City watching my brother reading a truck book! Must be a slow day...No, really, I enjoyed seeing G, especially the outside shots of suburban New Jersey:
http://carlssummerblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/big-truck.html.

I'll be leaving Utah tomorrow. We had a great family reunion at a church campground in Heber Valley at about 10 thousand feet. It was wonderful seeing aunts and uncles and cousins. We had great food, a beautiful lake to canoe on and "challenge course four." This consisted of a 25 ft. telephone pole to be scaled, a 25 foot long high-wire to be traversed, with knotted ropes dangling above it at about 6 foot intervals for handholds, and another telephone pole at the far end of the high wire with a little perch to sit on, from which one is launched on a zip wire:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_wire
Family History note: our son had an unfortunate incident with a zip wire when he was in kindergarten, which involved a lot of blood and his two front teeth being pushed up.
I had heard about the zip wire and was looking forward to riding it. However, no one had told me how you got to the zip wire. When I first saw it, I was SURE I wouldn't be taking the challenge EVER. But they wouldn't let me do the zip wire without going up the pole, across the high-wire and onto the teeny little perch.
Obviously the end of this story is that I did the challenge and survived. I was nearly sick with anxiety at the thought of possibly even trying even just the telephone pole climb, possibly. Once I started,it was really scary, but very safe. I was harnessed to a belay rope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belaying). Luckily, while I was debating about the attempt, I overheard someone say, "Don't look down," which was the best advice I could have had. I never came close to looking down. In fact, the view of the treetops in the distance is burned into my memory. I'm not sure I've ever concentrated so hard on anything as I did that view. It was intense. My mouth has never been so dry, not even after surgery when the nurse wouldn't let me even swish water in my mouth. About mid-high-wire, my dry mouth was almost as bad as the fear itself.
The zip wire was fun. Since it starts about 25 feet above the forest, it's really an amazing ride. Many people rode the zip wire "no hands," but after the high-wire ordeal I gave myself permission to hang on tight. I shook for quite awhile afterward.
This was at 11 a.m. Our group was also scheduled for 2 p.m. and since there were some extra tickets, I considered going again. It felt so unreal that I had actually done it that I wanted to do it a second time to convince myself I'd done it once. I spent a long, long time watching others accomplish the challenge, including my son for the second time and my daughter for the first, before I committed to going again. It was just a little teeny bit less scary. Before I started up I took a few sips of water and remembered to breathe through my nose, so my mouth wasn't quite so dry.

The second time, I waved my arms on the zip wire. Triumph!

BTW, my sneakers have done the challenge 4 times: once with me at 11 a.m., once on my son, who didn't bring sneakers and had broken the shoelaces of his father's sneakers in the morning, once on my daughter and then on me again. What brave little sneakers!