Yellow Ribbon, Climbing, and Sunshine

David recently spent sometime overseas with the Utah National Guard.  After returning home the whole unit (including the soldier's families) have to meet up for a "Reintegration Yellow Ribbon Program".  This consists of two days of meetings informing us about many topics that sometimes, but not always, have to do with the deployment and post-deployment life.  I go into to these meetings with a great attitude ready to learn about the resources that are available to us military families and most often leave thinking, well that could have been 5 times shorter than it was.  The meetings were held in Southern Utah so we planned on spending some of our free time rock climbing.
On day one we were able to squeeze in about 2 hours of climbing in before the sun went down at the Black Rocks just outside of town.  (We climbed here about 2 weeks ago and I have already blogged about it.  I'm pretty sure that I said that we would be back to climb the area again soon but not even I thought it would be this soon.)

Oh yeah, Dave's best bud, "Stevo", joined in on the fun also.

By the way, I FINALLY gave lead climbing another go and after it was said and done I thought it was a lot of fun.  I remember the last thing I thought before I started climbing and to stop myself from backing out was, "growth only comes once you leave your comfort zone".  My lead climbing situation is so sad to me because I both want to do it and I have no desire what so ever to do it all at the same time.  My top-rope climbing game is really doing pretty good I just need to take some falls and get over it so I can (hopefully) transfer that to my lead climbing game too.

Luckily, on day two of fun filled meetings we got out before noon and had plenty of time to climb.  We picked the Green Valley Gap area to climb and it was awesome.  We had to/got to rappel into the canyon and rappelling into a climbing area was new to me and I thought it added to the experience.  I'll have to have Dave write about the technical aspects of the two climbing areas and maybe he will even write the areas reviews....

Climbing in the the Green Valley Gap area was awesome and only climbed a very small portion of it.  I think we could easily spend a whole weekend in this one area.  I think once we got the bitter taste of boring Yellow Ribbon meetings out of our mouths it was a pretty good trip.  I am excited to get out there again and I hope it's soon.