Wichita Mountains Climbing Weekend

 This past weekend was our third and final climbing and rappelling class for our instructors cards.  We were at the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge just north of Lawton, OK.  The campsite was just outside the park right on a lake and if you look in the picture you can see to the right the lower part of the tallest mountain in the park which is Mt. Scott.  What was nice about this campsite was the wind coming off the water at night kept the nights cool since we are now starting the warm season of summer.

 You are wondering why I took a picture of our Saturday morning breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage.  Well this was our first attempt at eating Pete the Chicken's eggs on a campout.  My wife boils them and takes them to school with her but Zaine and I have not had any until this weekend.  Lucky for us she has been real steady with dropping those eggs out and we had 16 eggs for the five of us to split over two mornings.  These were the best eggs ever, not just because we fed dog food to Pete and this is what she gave us but backyard free range chicken eggs are great.  Now after I ate this around 7:00am I had a 9:00am snack of two honey buns on Saturday morning and Sunday after breakfast I had 4 oranges.  The great thing about being active outdoors with diabetes is you have to eat about every two hours and take in lots of calories and carbs.  My BG's got a little low around 10:00am on Saturday but by 11:30am they were around 180 and stayed there most of the rest of the day until about 5:00pm when they dipped to 44 and I ate some delicious sour gummy worms and in thirty minutes they were up and I was rolling along.  Paul brought our usual sliced meat and sandwich rolls for our lunches and all the other adults were so jealous and I would eat an orange about once every few hours to keep my BG's up and also my energy level high.

 The Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge is home to Buffalo, Elk and Longhorn Cattle herds.  Probably my favorite animal of all is the Buffalo and to go out and hike and climb with them all around is an amazing thing to do.  Paul would not stop the van for me to get a better picture but to just see the Buffalo roaming the open areas is real exciting.  One year we had a Buffalo walk through our camp.  The boys thought it was the most amazing thing ever.  They are huge beautiful creatures but are extremely dangerous if you try anything with them.  These are not cows just out roaming the pastures, these are almost wild beasts.

The Picture above you can see one of our groups setting up "The Meat Grinder" climb.  We set up the anchors and would rappel down then climb from the bottom with a bottom belay.  At the top of the picture near the right you see two boulders just sitting on the side of Elk Mountain.  The rangers refer to these boulders as "The apple and Pear" but for scouts and all my life we always referred to them as "King Kong's Balls."  A little crude but come on don't tell me two giant boulders on the side of a mountain are fruit.  We all know what to really call them.