T'was the Week Before New Year's

This past Wednesday (New Year's Eve) the church held a joint English/Mongolian fellowship.  In preparation for that, the church's cleaning crew (i.e. John and I) cleaned up the church on Tuesday.  The fellowship went very well.  We had all sorts of different food ranging from buzz to home made oatmeal cream pies.  That night, John and I were talking to a missionary friend of ours.  He said that the following morning, he was going to climb a mountain somehwere around here so he could say that the first thing he did in 2009 was climb a mountain.  Well, John and I thought it was a great idea and figured "why not."  So we got up New Year's Day morning and went over to our friend Michael's house.  We started walking and flagged over a taxi cab.  He asked us where we wanted to go and we said "a big mountain."  Well, about twenty minutes we arrived at our destination.  We really didn't know the name of where we were and hardly new where we were, but wherever it was, we were there.  We started climbing and soon realized that being a little under a mile above sea level makes climbing harder than it is in Oregon, but we pressed on.  There were times when we were in the sun and shedding layers left and right, and then there were times in which I lost all feeling in both of my hands.  After about two hours of climbing, we stopped and started a fire.  Michael had brought a package of bacon, so we found a thin rock and cooked some bacon over our fire.  It was without a doubt the best bacon I've ever had in my life.  After eating our bacon and putting out the fire, we found the highest point we could find and headed out for that.  We finally got to the tip of the mountain and the view was absolutely amazing.  We took some pictures and started to head back down when I remembered one more thing.  I had brought a glass coke bottle to christen the the mountain we climbed up.  So in light of the delicious bacon we had, we all decided to name it Bacon Ridge.  When we finally got home, we were pretty exhausted, but we can now say that the first thing we did in 2009 was climb a mountain in Mongolia.