Intro to Rock Climbing

 We headed over to the Boston Rock Gym in Woburn, Ma and took an introductory rock climbing course. This place was pretty cool, the auto-belay devices are really neat, kids loved being able to clip themselves in and climb a whole bunch of different spots.

Hiking at Breakheart

Went for a nice quick 3 mile hike at Breakheart Reservation before heading over to Trader Joe's. Perfect light coating of snow.

Extreme Sledding-Fiona

Testing out the new GoPro at Bailey's Hill

Extreme Sledding-Ethan

Essex County Elementary School XC Champtionships

Amazing day at Gannon Golf Course in Lynn. Kids ran the the .71 mile XC course in awesome time, never giving up, pacing themselves at the beginning and passing people all the way through. Perfect results winning medals (they only gave medals for the first 10 places) each getting 10th place. So proud of how great they did.
Ethans's Results: http://www.coolrunning.com/results/13/ma/Nov9_1stAnn_set2.shtml
Fiona's Results: http://www.coolrunning.com/results/13/ma/Nov9_1stAnn_set1.shtml

Lynn Woods Fall hike

Went for a nice 4 mile loop in Lynn Woods as a family on a beautiful fall Saturday. Got to walk down into Dungeon Rock and up Stone Tower, someone must open them up on the weekends. Pretty Cool. Ran with both kids down the back side single track of Stone Tower, all the way from the top.

Wolf Pits Hike

Allison, Ethan and I went for a quick 3 mile hike in search of "Wolf Pits" in the Lynn Woods-Fiona was out for her birthday lunch and a movie w/ Gammy. Although I run here all the time, I rarely explore this area of the woods. We found them fairly easily as they are marked on the Lynn Woods map. Supposedly these deep stone lined pits were used in the late 1600's early 1700's to kill wolves. They were about 7 ft long, 4 ft wide by about 7ft deep, back in the day they were baited and covered. The hungry wolves would fall in, evidently it was a very effective method for dealing with wolves which destroyed livestock-Lynn Woods was a large common grazing area for cattle through the mid 1700's. Beautiful fall day, easy flat hike, spent about an hour and half in the woods with a stop for lunch. A Map of Lynn Woods is here: http://www.flw.org/pdf_files/lwmap.pdf  a link to info on Lynn Woods and the "Wolf Pits" is here:  http://www.flw.org/landmarks.html#stone_tower It was a great afternoon.