Levitation 29…..completed!

On Tuesday Mike and I tackled ‘Levitation 29’, the long canyon route I wanted to do. We did it without a hitch! I’m excited to have done it, and totally exhausted! Here’s the rundown: We arrived at the park just a couple minutes after the gates opened at 6:00 a.m. (yes, that means I was up at 5:00, miracle of miracles). Drove around the loop road and were on the trail by 6:30. After about ½ hour of easy hiking we descended into the wash to start the tough part of the approach.

We spent about an hour scrambling over and around huge boulders up the base of the gully between two mountains. When I say huge boulders I’m not kidding, we’re talking boulders as big as cars and small houses! There were quite a few good size pools and some little waterfalls that we had to navigate around as well; the water was perfectly clear and just beautiful. Just as I was feeling like we would never get there, we arrived at the base of the cliff….sort of. First we had to hike up about 1000 feet of slabby rock. Just imagine climbing 1000 steep stairs and you’ll have some idea of how my legs were feeling! Two hours after leaving the car we got to the bottom of the climb, geared up and got on the wall. The climbing was incredible, very different to the other stuff we’ve done here. We didn’t see a single other person the entire day….it was so nice to enjoy the peace and solitude (duitude? J), focus on the climbing and feel like we were the only people for miles around. It’s probably one of the only times I’ve been so far out in the middle of nowhere. I really enjoyed the route, the crux pitch was definitely hard! And long! For the last 20 feet or so I was just grunting and clawing my way up, hoping my arms would hold out long enough to get me to the end. They did…just barely! A few more pitches after that and we were done, I couldn’t believe it! Well, done with the upward portion of the day anyway. Then came the hardest part…getting down off the wall and hiking out! We rapped down with no problems, ropes didn’t get caught on anything which was a big relief.

I was totally exhausted by then and not looking forward to hiking myself out of there, but I didn’t see any helicopters hovering by waiting to pick me up, so on foot I went! J We descended the slabs as quickly as we could to get to the bottom of that section by dark….not an easy prospect given how steep and slippery they were. Mike showed me his technique for moving down quickly, and off we went, crab walking away! Too bad there was no one to take a video of us, because I’m sure we looked pretty silly! Had a little snack and a rest just as we entered the long gully section, put on our headlamps and continued the hike in the dark. It was a beautiful night, lots of stars, a quarter moon and luckily for us it stayed nice and warm. Because it was dark out we took our time getting down through the boulders, which was perfect since I was too tired to move faster anyway! By the time we got to the last easy section of the hike it was all I could do to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, everything hurt and I felt like I could just lay down and sleep for about a week. We could only see the 20 feet or so in front of us that were lit by our headlamps, so we had no way to know how far away we were from the car, and the trail just kept going, and going….. Finally, at 8:15, we got to the parking lot. Yippee! I’ve never been so excited to sit down. Total time: 13 hours 45 minutes! What an incredible experience.

Levitation 29

Stellar Weekend

We had an amazing time last weekend! Gorgeous weather for climbing, so sunny and warm! On Friday Mike and I did our second try at Solar Slab to practice for Levitation. Everything went well, we started a little later than last time but still managed to finish the route, despite encountering a water obstacle. At the end of one of the pitches there was a waterfall running over the rock, directly over the bolts for our anchors! Mike had to make an anchor with our gear off to the side, and I had to climb carefully around the water to try to keep the ropes dry. It was funny, because some guys rapped past who had done the pitch a couple hours before us, and they said there was no water when they came through! I guess the snow up high on the mountain started melting finally.

On Saturday we met some great people and did lots of fun climbs at Sunny & Steep Wall, and on Sunday we climbed with some of the same folks at Cannibal Crag. Not a lot to report, just a lot of fun in the sun! Here are a few pictures of our escapades:

Feb part 1

Weather woes and good company

We haven’t had the best weather over the last couple of weeks. It’s been pretty cold here, at least 10 degrees colder than normal for this time of year, and believe it or not there’s been quite a bit of rain! There have been several big rain storms and even a fair amount of snow in the higher elevations. Kind of crazy!

We’ve been very thankful to have a place to stay here instead of camping lately…we’re dry and warm at night and have a shower whenever we want which is pretty luxurious.

Despite the weather’s attempts to thwart us we’ve been having a lot of fun; the climbing is fantastic and we’ve been hanging out with some great people. We’ve climbed several times with our friends Pete and Erin; they treated us to a great dinner at their place one night and a soak in the hot tub. Also visited with Mike’s friend Bruce who lives out here but is originally from Maine. They’ve climbed together quite a lot over the years and they seemed to have a great time catching up and reminiscing about past adventures. We spent a day hanging out with our friend Dana from Rhode Island, he was out here for work and we had a great time showing him some of the wonders of Red Rocks. Almost every day out here we meet new people, it’s one of the great things about the climbing community! People tend to be very friendly at the crags, always have stories to share, and it’s great to find out where everyone comes from. Inevitably people will offer to let you stay with them if you’re ever visiting near them……it’s amazing to me how this activity pulls people together! We’ve met lots of folks from all over Canada, several parties from different places in England, people from Oregon, California, Idaho…..everyone flocks to Red Rocks in the winter! We’ve also met a number of local people through our friend Mike (who is letting us live with him).

Here are some pictures from the last couple of weeks:

Jan part 2

Wildlife sightings for the week:

Coyote, group of quail (covey? gaggle?), red-naped sapsucker (looked like a woodpecker), a jack rabbit, a side-blotched lizard, and several interesting birds that I haven’t had time to identify yet. Dana said he saw a gray fox, so I’ll count that in my list.

That’s all folks! Love, health, and happiness to all!

5:15 a.m. It's not my favorite time....

One of my goals before we leave Vegas is to do a long, multi-pitch route called Levitation 29. It’s in one of the canyons at Red Rocks, so instead of a 15 minute hike up to the sport climbing crags where we climb routes 30-80 feet high, we’ll have to hike an hour and a half to a huge wall where we’ll climb a total of 1000 feet before rappelling back to the base. It’s a huge endeavor! To prepare Mike and I decided to take a practice day on a wall that’s somewhat taller but much closer to the trailhead and much easier climbing.

First, a little vocab lesson for any non-climbing readers:

Pitch—a length of rock face to climb. On long routes, pitches will generally be 50-150 feet long, usually between natural ledges. One person climbs the pitch first, anchors in, then belays their partner up. That person continues climbing up the 2^nd pitch, arrives at the next anchor and belays person #1 up. Lather, rinse, repeat until you get to the top!

Anchor—a way of connecting yourself directly to the rock at the stopping point of a pitch. On these routes the anchors are bolts drilled into the rock, you secure yourself to them, then belay your partner up from below you.

Belay—a method of feeding the rope through a special device that will allow you to catch your partner if they fall.

Rappel—a way of sliding down your rope to get back to the base of a climb. You use the same device for rappelling as for belaying. Descending a route requires a number of rappels, you have to stop at anchors and pull your ropes down every 100-200 feet

Away we go…..

The alarm went off at 5:15. Anyone who knows me will understand how painful that is! By 5:45 we were dressed and out the door, I was still half asleep, drinking my tea and munching on cereal while Mike drove. About 6:30 we arrived at the trailhead, put on a couple layers, packed the final stuff in our bags and got on the trail. It was cold. And dark. I wasn’t fully awake yet. The hike was pretty easy; about 15 minutes of flat trail winding through the desert into the mouth of the canyon, then 5 more minutes or so of steeper hiking and scrambling to reach the base of the wall. The sun came up and we finally got warm, but it wasn’t supposed to get much higher than 45 degrees, so we were hoping to stay in the sun as much as possible and avoid becoming ice cubes. A drink and a snack; harnesses, gear, and shoes on…and we’re climbing!

Pitch 1 went well, I led and ended up doing 2 pitches by accident because the info from the guidebook was a bit off. No big deal, I still had enough rope to get to the next anchors and belay Mike up. He led the next pitch, then I took the last one (2 combined again) to get us to the top of the first part of the climb. There was a huge slabby area where we could sit and have a snack and get ready for the second part of the route called Solar Slab. Mike led up the first pitch and we continued on our merry way. On the third pitch he got off route a bit and we ended up losing some time. We realized next time it would be good to make a photocopy from the guidebook showing the line of the route instead of just trying to trace it on our own little paper. But that’s the whole point of the practice run! The main problem was that I was belaying with my feet in the shade, so by the time he got back on route and up to the next anchor my feet were popsicles! We were both pretty cold by the time I got up to him, the sun was starting to move off the rock and we decided it was time to finish up. I led up one more pitch to get us to a good spot to descend from, then we started to rappel down. We had 300 or so feet left to go, so we didn’t quite finish the whole route.

Brrrr! With the sun gone we were really starting to get chilled. My hands were almost as frozen as my feet, but we still had almost 1000 feet of wall to descend so it was time to just grit my teeth and bear it. We got down to the mid-point where we stopped for lunch and bumped into a couple of English guys we’d met a few days earlier. We rapped the rest of the way down with them and had a good time chatting and hearing about what they’d been doing during their trip. We made it to the ground safely at about 4:30, cold, tired and glad to be back to our down jackets and wool socks! Packed up the gear and hiked back to the car and were on the road by about 5:30. Eleven hours from car to car! Phew. It was hard, I still have a lot to learn about this type of climbing. Keeping the ropes organized, setting up belay anchors efficiently, route finding….the climbing was the easiest part! It was a really good opportunity for us to work as a team and figure out some of the skills I need to work on to get ready for the big route I want to do.

Solar Slab

It’s funny, I was pondering some stuff while I was climbing. I got to one point and reached my hand up, thinking to myself ‘It’d be great if there was a good hold right here’….and there was! It occurred to me that climbing has taught me a lot about living. Sometimes you think you need a hold right there, and there it is. And sometimes you think you need a hold right there, but all you get is a tiny edge. Suddenly you have to redefine what you think you need, and learn how to work with what’s in front of you. You have to draw on strength you’re not sure you have in order to keep moving forward. So you place your feet the best you can, start pulling on that tiny edge and trust that it will be enough to get you through. And you know what? It almost always is. What you’re presented with might not be what you expected, or what you wanted or what you hoped for, but if you’re creative and trust in your own strengths and have a little faith….well, it can be enough.

You can't recycle in Las Vegas

It’s hard to imagine that a major metropolitan area like Vegas wouldn’t have some kind of recycling program. But, I guess that’s just the essence of this city. Conservation seems like a dirty word in a land of excess and unbridled development and sprawl. Mile after mile of new housing developments and shopping plazas, all with irrigated landscaping and pools. In the desert. And at the same time every apartment complex has multiple vacancies, they’re all advertising move-in specials; and some neighborhoods we’ve driven through have for sale signs in at least a third of the yards. Being in this city is frustrating that way; there’s so much waste on such an incredibly large scale. At a time when I’m trying to be more conscious of reducing my impact on the planet, it’s disheartening to be surrounded by an enormous city that seems bent on creating the most damage possible.

(Oh, by the way, I did find a way to recycle. Whole Foods has bins outside their store….I don’t think they intended for me to bring my household stuff there, but nobody stopped me!)

Rest days are scarce!

Wow! We've been having an amazing time, but very busy.....doesn't leave much time for catching up on posting here!

After arriving in Vegas two weeks ago we jumped back into the car the next morning and went out for our first day of climbing. It was a beautiful sunny day and we played around on the rock, getting our muscles used to the idea of pulling us up the cliff faces again. That afternoon my friend Colin met up with us, and on Saturday our friend Sarah flew in from NH for her first climbing trip out west! The four of us stayed at the campground near the Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area where we'd be spending most of our days climbing and exploring the incredible surroundings. The weather was perfect, lots of sun and blue skies during the day, but darn cold at night! Once the sun went down we bundled up in lots of layers to cook dinner, then jumped into sleeping bags to rest up for the next busy day.

On Wednesday last week we all packed our stuff into the SUV Colin had rented (and I mean packed! There was barely room to move.) and we drove about 3 hours West to Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California. We met up with Mike's friends Ben, Meaghan and Dan who live in Davis, CA, and his friend Derek who lives and works in the area off and on.

Joshua Tree is such a beautiful place! It's very wild and pure feeling, definitely one of my favorite spots in the world. The rock formations are incredible, they look like huge jumbles of boulders just stacked all over the place. And the Joshua trees themselves look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book! Almost all of the plants have thorns or prickers of one kind or another, so you have to be careful where you walk, but the desert feels very open because there isn't much that grows taller than 5-6 feet (except the Joshua trees). You don't see much in the way of wildlife; some small lizards, big hares and little rabbits, and of course the famous coyotes. We saw one coyote strolling around the campground each day at dusk, obviously it had learned that where there are people there might be food. For the most part though, we'd only hear the coyotes yipping and calling to each other early in the morning or in the middle of the night. It's definitely a thrilling sound to wake up to! Their calls are really interesting, all sorts of different howls, yips and barks. It sounds like they're having a conversation.

The weather turned quite cold when we arrived at Joshua Tree, the first two days we were there we didn't feel like climbing too much because it was hard to get out of the wind. But the mornings were nice, we all got up late, had leisurely breakfasts and then spent some time stretching and doing ab exercises out in the middle of our campsite. What a life! The last two days warmed up quite a bit and we did some bouldering and tired ourselves out completely. Nights were spent cooking dinners and hanging out around the campfire toasting marshmallows. Sarah, Ben, Dan and I did a moonlight walk up the rock formation in our campsite one night. The moon was almost full and incredibly bright, we didn't need any headlamps to see where we were going. We found a way to scramble most of the way up the formation, probably about 150 feet up, and had a great view out over the campground and a big area of the park....it was very cool to see all the little campfires so far below us.


On Sunday afternoon Mike, Colin, Sarah and I smushed ourselves back into the car for the drive back to Las Vegas. We were tired and dirty, so decided to treat ourselves to a cheap hotel room where we could shower and sleep in a real bed. We were all exhausted! Back to climbing at Red Rocks on Monday and Tuesday. On Tuesday night we went walking on the strip to show Sarah the craziness of the casinos, it was totally overwhelming....lights, noise, lots of people, quite a change from our climbing life! Wednesday morning Colin and Sarah took their respective planes back to Chicago and NH. It's weird to be without half of our foursome! Mike and I have spent the last two days resting, catching up on laundry, photos, emails and all that stuff. It's nice to have some time to relax a little; we've only had one 'rest' day since we got here and that was spent mostly squashed in the car on the road to J-Tree.

So, tomorrow it's back to climbing! We may be in for some rain and/or snow this weekend (had a little of both last night), hopefully the bad weather will pass us by and we'll be back soaking in the sun in the next couple of days.

Finally got some pictures posted online! Hope you enjoy them: (click on the photo to see each album)

Driving out

1st two weeks

I hope this finds all of you well! Sending love to family and friends!

And we're off!

So, 2,800 miles of driving in 3 days is pretty rough! Mike and I left around 9:00 Monday morning, drove through: NH, Mass, Conn (traffic jam near Hartford, bleagh), NY, Penn, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois before stopping for a brief break early Tue morning. We took turns driving and sleeping until 5:30 a.m., pulled over for a nap then moved on out as a bad rain storm was coming in. We hit St. Louis just as rush hour was starting, and to add to the fun we got stuck in traffic again. This time the highway was closed because of an overturned tractor trailer, so it was time for evasive maneuvers! Found a way to get through the city and back to the highway (through a really rundown and abandoned area, kind of depressing), and then it was back to covering some miles. Pushed on through Missouri and Kansas and got a couple of hours into Colorado then stopped for the night for a good rest before attempting to cross the Rockies.

Bright and early Wed morning (6:00 a.m.) it was off on the final leg. Weather was a little iffy, and we started to have snow on the road as we hit higher elevations. The driving was okay, and we made it through the passes with no problem. Down the western side was a little more tricky as it was snowing a bit more, but it wasn't too bad. Snow kept coming until we hit the Utah border, then suddenly stopped and within a half hour we had beautiful sunshine! Kept on trucking, and just for some more adventure we hit another snowstorm as we went through the mountains. It was most unwelcome! Finally, at 8:00 p.m. we arrived in Las Vegas at our friend Mike's place (yes, it's confusing, there are a lot of Mikes)!! Thoroughly exhausted and reeeaaalllyy hoping not to have to sit down ever again.

Thursday we started climbing! My friend Colin met up with us, and Sarah arrived today (Saturday), so we're looking forward to lots of good climbing, hanging out in the sun and just generally enjoying being slackers! :)