This past weekend was the big group camping trip to El Malpais which Jessica organized for her birthday.

The way these people camp is largely antithetical to what I think camping should be. Despite agreeing on a hike-in camp spot, people brought coolers (filled mostly with beer) and spent most of the time at camp drinking and talking about drinking. When we left the campsite was a wreck and it wasn't even where we were supposed to be camping, according to the park.

Those annoyances aside, I did get to take some new GPS points at the lave tubes in the El Calderon area and we climbed Mt. Taylor, the 11,301' highpoint of Cibola County. The trip report for the climb is here.

Richard once again astounds me with his level of preparedness. When we went to go climb the mountain, he was going to bring raw hot dogs for lunch because he hadn't brought anything except grill food and oatmeal for the whole trip. I lent him my spare lunch of peanut-butter tortillas. On the hike, he wore jeans, cotton socks, and a cotton sweatshirt. No wind layer and nothing synthetic. By the end he was very wet and uncomfortable.

But aside from all this bitching, I am really happy that I got to climb that mountain and succeed, although I was sucking pretty hard on it due to a cold sleep the night before and a lack of eating. I'm all jazzed-up about highpointing again. In May, when Nina goes to her college reunion in Massachusetts, I'm going to drop her off at the airport and then go highpointing on my way down to Slaughter Canyon for some caving.

If all goes as planned, I'll bag the highpoints of Socorro, Chaves, and Lea counties all in one day. I've got my eye on Sierra Blanca and Elk Mountain for future trips too. Oh, and this coming weekend I'm going to try to climb Caballo - finally doing the highpoint of the county I live in!

Here's some dorky highpointing statistics I drew up.

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I put some more thought into my arcade cabinet project and redesigned the website for it. I think once we get moved into the new place I'm going to make finishing that a priority.