Off Route

This past week has been a roller coaster ride for me and my wife...from one of the highest points in my life, to one of the lowest and back up again.



Last Tuesday morning, April 26th, at 10:31, my wife gave birth to our first child...a little girl named Lily! I feel honored that my wife went with my name choice...I choose that name because I love the flowers, especially calla lilies, but also because I love the Lily boulders in the Obed, where my wife and I spent many a day at while she was finishing grad school at UT. We had a great pregnancy, with no complications and felt very fortunate about that! The delivery went well...my wife is my hero for doing that "natural", without pain meds. But quickly after the baby was born, she was moved to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) due to respiratory problems that the doctors feared was an infection. Our wedding was amazing, but the birth of our child was equally amazing, if not more...and this turn of events felt like we had climbed to the top of the cliff and then the rope snapped and we fell to the ground with a hard thud. We spent the next torturous week in the NICU with Lily, seeing her improve gradually and trying to scrape ourselves up off the deck. Thankfully, she is all better now and yesterday we were discharged from the hospital and finally were able to bring our little Ashe-villain home! A big thanks to all those awesome nurses in the NICU at Mission Hospital in Asheville that took care of Lily and us!!!

So this post isn't about bouldering really, but about getting off route in life...everybody does it from time to time, but it sure feels so good to get back on route and keep climbing! Thanks for the support of all my friends and family that kept our spirits high throughout this whole ordeal!



I cant leave you with NO bouldering stuff in this post though. A couple of days before the baby was born, I was at Little Eastatoee working Rhodorete V3/4...an awesome lesser known problem in the Jocassee Gorges. In the woods near Rhodorete was a beautiful Pink Lady Slipper, a unique orchid for the area, that had just emerged and was begging to be stared at...take a look at this amazing flower. In my next post, I'm going to put the local spotlight on the Rhodorete Boulder and provide a photo topo like I did for the Best Feeling boulder in my previous post.