Is Camping Considered Laboring?

Laboring: 1. a. Physical or mental exertion, especially when difficult or exhausting; work.

So to answer my question - sleeping in a tent (on rocks), in the middle of the freezing woods, with no bathroom/shower/perfume/makeup, and cooking your food over a fire you had to build yourself - YES is considered 'laboring'. 

But, in between all of the crazy wedding thoughts going through my mind a long weekend out of the city couldn't have come at a better time. Nick and I decided to spend a few days at our favorite camping digs up by Clear Creek Reservoir.  

Now, anyone who knows me knows that I deserve a gold star for 3 days of camping - it's truly not what I excel at but sometimes I can step up my A-game and get down and dirty in the woods (plus, it helps that Nick entices me with boxed wine and the option to wear pajamas for 3 straight days).  We were joined by Zach & Michelle and we spent the weekend enjoying the beautiful Colorado outdoors.  

Where the heck were we?  Clear Creek reservoir is located right outside Leadville, about 2 hours outside Denver.  Not a shabby drive at all!

While Michelle and I were whipping up walking taco's for dinner the boys were throwing their ax's at a tree stump.  We tried to explain the stupidity of it to them, they tried to explain the awesomeness of it to us.  Boys...

Around the campfire the night before we all pledged to wake up at 7am to hit Mt. Belford and hike a 14er...well, since there aren't alarm clocks in the woods I accidentally slept til 10 and we got a late start causing us to only make it halfway up the mountain.  Hey, in my defense I was trying to 'labor' as little as possible. 

For those of you who don't know what a fourteener is (because I had no idea what it was until I moved here), it's a mountain that exceeds 14,000 ft above sea level.  In Colorado there are 53 14er's.  IF we had made it to the top of Mt Belford, here's a view of what it would look like.

Since we only made it halfway up before the storms rolled in, here are some pictures of us climbing what I call a 7K :)

All in all a fun trip and as many gold stars as I earned for this trip, the inventor of dry shampoo gets double that.