Following directions

 I wanted to take my Mountainsmith Lumbar day pack with my new strapettes so bad this past weekend but the rule was we had to bring a bag that was at least 2,000 cubic inches and we also had to bring a gallon of water or more.  Both of those were over the top for the lumbar day pack with all my personal climbing gear and diabetes junk.  The only other option I had was to bring my Kelty backpack.  The Kelty backpack is much larger than what was needed but I figured that there was going to be plenty of extra stuff I wanted to bring.  Notice me wearing my eye protection, no more sticks in the eyes for me.

 To my surprise when I showed up to loading and looked around, everyone else decided it was time to bring the smallest bag they could find.  Some of these bags were smaller than those shoulder bags you get from the Apple store.  Above you can see the jolly green giant next to a few other packs.  The other packs in this picture were some of the larger ones that everyone had.  Once we broke into groups and we had the gear we needed to set our lines, just like I figured the entire group wanted me to bring the 50' rope, the 200' rope, and all the steel carabiners since they had little room for anything else.

 Here is my friend Paul coiling up our 200' rope after we flaked it to see if there were any damaged spots or weak points.  The class received lots of opportunities to jump in and do everything.  If you didn't jump in the instructors made you because we were to be instructors after these three weekends.

 Here is a picture of more of the gear we used to get our line down.  We had a safety line and three anchor points.  The anchor line had butterfly knots tied into it at various spots so that we could tether into it and work safely while dangling over the edge.

My son surprised me with this photo.  He was on the peak next to us and saw me rappelling down with my pack on.  We had to take our gear and packs with us everywhere we went.  You never knew if we would be back to any certain point and your pack had your lunch, water, first aid, and mine had all sorts of diabetes equipment.The photo here is grainy because my sons phone is on the lower end of the price range.  He likes to wash them quite often.  In the end I was happy that I could mule in all the heavy gear and that helped me burn some extra calories and after everyone made fun of me at the beginning because of the jolly green giant they appreciated it at the end because they stuffed three 200' ropes in my pack when we headed out.