Red River Gorge, Kentucky: Climbing til our arms fall off

We’ve been here at the Red for nearly five weeks now; leaves and wildflowers are busting out everywhere, we had a week of sunny weather with temps in the 80’s (bliss!), and we just keep climbing on this crazy steep rock! Our days start off in a leisurely way, I roll out of bed around 9:00 (Mike is up early as always, usually inside chatting with Miguel), we have breakfast, and make the rounds of friends’ tables to see what the plans for the day look like and what everybody is in the mood for. It’s rare that we leave for climbing before 10:30, but since it stays light out til 8:30 or so a late start doesn’t really matter! There are hundreds of crags scattered throughout the region, with thousands of different climbs to do. With so much climbing available, the dilemma is how to keep ourselves off the rock when our bodies need rest! Most days we end up climbing with some permutation of the long-term crew who are here from all over : Bryce (Texas), Cristin (Penn.), Eric & Kyler (Alaska), Jenny (Wyoming), Chuck (Quebec), Malek & Steph (Ontario), Dave (Ohio, now lives here), and some assorted others. It’s a pretty fantastic life! Our worries are limited to whether we have any strength left to climb, and what the weather looks like!

This area of eastern Kentucky is in the heart of Appalachia; it’s a land full of steep hills and ‘hollers’, tiny churches that look like they might hold 40 people, and winding roads without guard rails that threaten to dump you into a ravine. Our favorite thing here is the ‘Tradio’. It’s a local radio show where people call in to sell or trade things. And boy, do they have a random assortment of stuff to get rid of! Lawnmower engines, goats, childrens’ clothes, car parts, old appliances, rabbits….we’ve seen the yards and can imagine folks just looking out the door and thinking “Hmm, maybe we should get rid of some of this stuff….let’s call the Tradio!” It’s a great piece of local color, fun to hear the accents! On Sundays that station plays bluegrass gospel music; good stuff! It’s certainly an interesting corner of the world, we really enjoy it.

We had initially planned to be leaving here around now and heading back West, but we’ve decided to stick around a while longer. Well, actually, I’m leaving on Friday for a week at home; I’ll visit friends and family, pick up my dog, then meet Mike back down here. And then…..we’ll see! We may stay in Kentucky til the heat chases us out, but we’re pretty sure we’ll be in Colorado for June. We’ll keep you posted!

Til next time!

RedRiver Gorge 2

Red River Gorge, Kentucky: Living in a swamp

We’ve had quite a lot of rainy weather in the three weeks we’ve been here, and the campground is at the bottom of a holler, so life here has been pretty damp! We are now quasi-permanent residents of Miguel’s, a combination pizza place, climbing gear shop, and climber’s campground. It’s a unique place, to say the least! We arrived on a Friday afternoon, and our first week some friends came to climb with us, so we didn’t fully appreciate the extent of the weekend crowds. Then Friday rolled around again and suddenly you could hardly find space to walk between all the tents, parking was at a premium, and forget finding a spot to sit inside! It’s a pretty crazy contrast; during the week there might be 20 people camped here, and on weekends there must be at least 100 or so.

Despite the rains we’ve managed to do a lot of amazing climbing. It’s fun to be part of the long-term resident crowd; we’ve met a bunch of great people, including some guys from Alaska that we bumped into in Maine last fall! Small world. We’re planning to stay here until the end of April, so hopefully we’ll have enough time to get on most of the routes we’ve been excited about.

I’ve been enjoying the emergence of Spring yet again, seems like it’s been chasing us the last month or so! Violets, daffodils and forsythia are blooming, so it feels a lot more like home. My favorite are the redbud trees, they’re everywhere and they have tons of tiny little purple flowers busting out when everything else has been pretty bare. I put some branches on our picnic table to spruce it up, so check out the picture in the photo album. The last few days have been gorgeous, so there’s been some basking in the sun…a very welcome change from the wet and gloomy that dominated the first two weeks.

Not too much else exciting to report…just climbing and more climbing. A bunch of folks from all over the place will be joining us this weekend, looking forward to catching up with friends we haven’t seen for a while!

Red River Gorge 1

On the Road Again: Traveling the Southeast

Well, we dragged ourselves away from Tuscon at long last. We originally thought we’d go straight to Kentucky to climb at the Red River Gorge, but Mother Nature had other plans for us. The weather forecast included snow on several days just when we would arrive, and we wanted nothing to do with that! To delay a bit we decided to take a little tour of three climbing areas farther south that were all within a few hours of each other. But first…..we had to get there. Sigh. Back in the car!

We left Tuscon late in the morning and stopped at Saguaro National Park on the way out, so we didn’t really get on the road until 1:00. Eight hours of driving later found us 100 miles into Texas, and ready for a break so we stayed at a cheap little motel. The next day we kept on driving through Texas. And driving. And driving. Texas is really big. And really dull. The route we took was a total of 800 loooong miles! Finished up day 2 of the trek just a few miles past Shreveport, Louisiana, camping in a National Forest. It was a little tricky to find an out of the way spot this time, but it was well worth the effort when we were woken by the bird jubilee the next morning! Hundreds of birds, singing their hearts out to greet the dawn….truly a beautiful moment. We continued on our way, passing through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama (3 new states for me!) before arriving at Horse Pens 40, a bouldering area in the northeast corner of Alabama.

We stayed one day, tired ourselves out on a lot of boulder problems then drove a couple of hours to northwestern Georgia to the top of another little mountain and another bouldering area. We had a fun day exploring the boulders but didn’t do too much climbing since we were so tired from the day before. Left in the late afternoon for the 2 hour jaunt to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Following directions in the climbing guidebook we found the ad-hoc campground in a beautiful little spot right next to the Tennesse River. It was stunning! The river is so wide and calm. The next day we needed a rest so we went into Chattanooga to do a little exploring. It’s a great city! We really enjoyed walking around the downtown area, they have lots of museums and fun shops and restaurants, and some beautiful riverfront parks. There’s a long pedestrian footbridge across the river, which seemed a popular spot for locals to jog on and tourists to meander along. We found a neat little coffee shop overlooking the river and got some internet time, then went out to dinner. Unfortunately we forgot to bring a camera, so we have no pictures of all our entertaining times. Oh well! The next day we went climbing at Tennesse Wall, about a 15 minute hike from where we were camped. It’s pretty convenient to be able to roll out of your tent, eat some breakfast, then walk up the hill to go climbing! We enjoyed the routes we did, and were lucky enough to have warm weather without it being too hot. Overall it was a great little side-trip!

The next morning we packed ourselves up and tried to figure out where the weather was sending us next. We finally decided to head on to Kentucky and the Red River Gorge as planned, since it looked like we’d have the best chance of avoiding rain that way! We arrived at Miguel’s (combination pizza/climbing shop and climber campground…..more on that next time!) late in the afternoon on Friday and got ourselves set up, happy to be settled semi-permanently at least.

Southeast Blitz