We climbed the mountain, all three of us.

We just got back (and ate lunch. I was famished!) from Hueco Tanks State Park, where we climbed the north mountain, all the way to the top. It was awesome. It turns out the Hueco Mountains are holy land for the Mescalaro Apache and Kiowa tribes, as well as the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, and there is tons of cave art there, which is like thousands and thousands of years old. We didn't go on the guided tour through the best of the cave art this time, but we saw one of the older paintings on the north mountain. The oldest paintings there are from about 10,000 years BC. We didn't get any pictures of the cave painting we saw because my camera batteries ran out before then, but we got pictures of some other stuff. We'll go back soon and take the guided tour so we can take pictures of a lot of the cave paintings.

Here's Erin, doing her first climb. I told her to trust her feet, because our feet always know if a hold is good enough. She climbed like a champ!


One of the views from where we started our climb.


Erin toward the end of the first rock face we scaled.



Me and Orren after scaling the first rock face of the climb. We're ready to conquer this big bitch, and that's exactly what we did.


Erin was so proud of herself every time she scaled another one. I was proud of her, too!


We're going up this rock face, and then up some more.


That's what we found at the end of this portion of the climb.


This is a hueco. Many species of animals live in these things, believe it or not, things like little shrimp and fish. They lay their eggs in it and they hatch during the monsoons when the huecos hold water again.



Here's me and Orren taking a little rest before we reached the top.


Erin near the top.



This ravine thing went straight through the middle of the mountain. It was pretty.



A little bit of view from the top.