Gnubbs Blog

Avalon is among the more recently developed crags in Boulder Canyon. The rock is nice, hard granite but is still pretty raw and lichen covered for lack of climbing. Scott and I met up at the dome around 4 or 4:30pm and headed up to sneak in some climbing.

We knew going out that we would not have much time this afternoon, but we both needed to get out. We had tried sunday morning, but the mountain gods had not smiled upon us. We were supposed to meet at 9am at the Dome in Boulder Canyon, but for some reason there was a traffic jam. As we waited in traffic, we say a life flight chopper fly overhead. Apparently, someone was drunk for the night before and messing around on a broken pile of rocks. He slipped, fell, and managed to get himself into critical condition.

At the time though, all we saw was the chopper and Rocky Mountain Rescue, so we assumed it was a climbing accident. Between that scene, and the questionable weather we decided to climb indoors on Sunday. Since I was getting out at ~1pm on Monday, we decided to try again. Scott got tied up at work until about 4pm. Although we were looking at a short day, we decided that was better than nothing. After we met at the Dome we decided to try out a crag neither of us had climbed before. Avalon has seen a lot of route development lately, and supposedly has a lot of very nice sport climbs.

We were able to find the crag without much difficulty, and then spent a while surveying the different routes along the couple hundred feet of clif face. We decided to start on a climb called Inclination, an easy 5.8 slab climb. (A slab climb refers to climbs where you are climbing along the face of a rock, instead of along a crack system. Generally slab climbs have a lot of small holds, smearing, and a general feeling of exposure. Not my favorite type of climb.) Scott made quick work of the leading the route, and I lowered him off. I followed up, and a little careful footwork and I was at the achors.

Next up was an even easier climb called Midway which follows a line not far from Inclination. Both climbs were easy, but pretty nice. Nothing spectacular, but enjoyable routes. Before pulling our ropes from Midway, we played on the very hard sport climb directly below midway. This was a hard roof, without much in the way of holds. I didn’t make to much progress on it.

Not a bad day. Had to make sure and blog it quickly, because it was not memorable enough for me to get the details right for long.

I am not sure how many more days there will be when I can get out and climb after work. The days are getting shorter and the weather is getting colder. Last weekend it snowed at altitude, and this weekend it is supposed to snow a lot lower. So, Scott and I are trying to take advantage of every opportunity that we get.

We met at the Dome in boulder canyon to decide where to climb. The sky looked like it might start raining on us, so we decided it might be a good day for single pitch sport climbing. The nice thing about sport pitches is that they are easy to bail off of if the weather goes south. Clip a biner and your cost of bailing is about $8. To do that off a trad route means leaving multiple pieces of gear and the price skyrockets.

So, we headed up the canyon to the Riviera to get in some climbs while the weather held. Luckily, the weather held and we were able to climb until dark. The climbing was enjoyable, but nothing spectacular. We climbed a number of 5.8 routes and may have mixed in a 5.9 somewhere in there. I am close to the point of leading my first sport climb, but have not quite gotten there. I have the climbing ability to climb confidently at 5.7 or 5.8, I just don’t have the mental confidence to lead yet. Soon.

A good day of climbing. I think we climbed 5-6 pitches each and got to enjoy a day outside for the first time in a while.

On a recent backpacking trip into the Indian Peaks wilderness, I bore witness to some terrible weather. It was a short trip — Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So, I sweet talked my boss into letting me out at noon on Friday, and I had my pack and was at my brothers house by 12:30pm.

The plan was to leave immediately from there, and head to the trailhead for our six mile hike to camp. When I got to his house, I met Wind and Sven who would be going with us. the lollygagging started almost immediately… By the time they had stopped for coffee, lunch, and generally fscked around it was 2:30 pm when we got to the trailhead.

We burdened our packs, and headed up the trail for King Lake. The weather was perfect and we made reasonable time. Many times we had to stop and wait for Wind to catch up after he stopped for god only knows what reason. Although it was not too late, we still did not have time to waste on our way to camp. I was starting to get a bad feeling about this.

The plan was to hike from the trailhead to Kings Lake on Friday, hike several miles along the continental divide to Devils Thumb lake on Saturday, and hike back to the trailhead on Sunday. This formed a 20 mile loop with 3-4000 feet elevation gain. A short sweet trip into the wilderness and back.

We arrived at camp about 6pm. Not bad really, and I immediately set up my tent and got ready to cook dinner. Dinner went well and we then sat around until late in the evening drinking. Mars was a brilliant bright red, and a yellow moon lit the entire cirque we were in to the point where we didn’t even need headlamps.

After a sound nights sleep, I awoke at around 8am, and started breakfast. All of my campmates were up, and after breakfast we started to strike camp for our days hike. The hike today would be about six miles, all of it above treeline (~12,000 feet). The would take us along the continentel divide to our next camp. One thing that is always important to remember is that you want to be of the divide by noon to avoid afternoon lightning storms.

By the time that the others in camp were ready to leave it was 10am, and I had been standing around ready to go for over an hour. We made decent progress up to the divide and then the lollygagging began. I did everything in my power to keep things moving, but stressing urgency to stoners is like trying to manage programmers. Noon came and went and we were still far from getting off the divide. The weather was looking bad in all directions, but no one else in the party seemed to understand the urgency of getting off the divide.

By 2pm, the weather was upon us, and we were just starting our descent to devils thumb lake, tree line, and relative safety. No sooner had we dropped off the divide than the lighting started and we were pelted by hail. The rain and hail were still falling as we completed our last mile hike to Devils Thumb Lake, so we hid in a grove of trees for cover.

As we waited for the storm to die down, looking over the ridge to the next drainage over we saw a scary sight. A funnel cloud had formed, and was stretching down towards the ground, rotating slowly. Christ, this is bad. Luckily, as we watched the mass of it struck a ridgeline, and the funnel broke up. It continued to rain for about an hour. As it stopped, I immediately began to set up camp and was able to get my tent up and gear into it before the rain started again. Unfortunately, others in the party did not feel the same sense of urgency, and they and much of thier gear was soaked.

As the rain picked up, I settled down in dry cloths into my dry sleeping bag inside my dry tent for a bit of rest. At about six PM, my brother called over from Svens tent that they were about to cook dinner if I wanted to come over. I grabbed my food and water and rushed through the rain to their tent. Inside, everything was wet. From thier cloths to Svens down sleeping bag. This was a bad scene. We unzipped the windows a bit, and Bryan fired up his stove. I am not a fan of cooking inside of tents, but the weather was far too bad outside for our stoves to run so we did not have many choices.

As they surveyed thier dinner options, I simply asked for two cups heated water. This was done, and I made a dehydrated curry and was eating by the time they figured out what to cook. The decided to just combine all of thier food into one pot and make some sort of “gumbo” dish. In the process of preparing it, the let all sorts of crumbs and food bits fall to the floor of the tent, and then neglected to clean it up. They also realized that they lacked any water, so Sven volunteered to run out and get some. As we were shuffling around the tent, Wind kicked over the stove and pot. Someone grabbed the stove, and grabbed Sven’s sleeping bag to try and keep it dry. As I lifted it out of the stew, I realized that the entire bag was soaked (down has zero insulation value when wet…). Sven at this point ran back to the tent and helped salvage thier food and clean up. Unfortunately, he had not gotten the water before all of this occurred.

In the end, they had some amount of food to eat, Sven was soaked and did not have a dry sleeping bag, and I gave them the rest of my water to cook with. Sven insisted that he would be okay, so I retired back to my still dry tent and sleeping bag. The next morning I woke up to find that everyone was still in good shape, the rain had slowed quite a bit but we could still see there was plenty of moisture in the clouds. We quickly broke camp and started down the trail to the car. We were managing to stay ahead of the rain front, but Wind kept stopping to do — well, what ever it is he does. Each time we would get ahead of him and have to stop and wait, allowing the rain and when to catch back up to us.

After taking far too long to make the hike back to the car, it was nice to be out of the wilderness. Just one more stop for coffee and lollygagging and I was back in my apartment.

This trip taught me some vital lessons. First, I have decided that I will no longer backpack with people I would not be comfortable climbing with. Anytime you are in the mountains there is the potential for the situation to get serious. The people I was backpacking with showed that they did not have an appreciation for that fact, and because of it I was put in a great deal of risk. I take very serious risks all of the time when climbing, snowboarding, etc. I am comfortable taking measured risks. I take risks where a mistake or mishap could result in serious injury or worse. However, I will only take these risks when I am very confident in my partners, my equipment and my abilities.

The people I was with forced me into situations where I was being put at risk for no good reason. There was no reason for us to be on that ridge after noon. And if we had not broken that rule we would have been comfortably in camp by the time the storms struck. I would not have been on exposed ground with lightening striking within a couple of hundred feet of where I was. I would not have arrived at camp wet and cold from wind and hail.

Never again will I backpack with someone I would not feel comfortable having on the other end of my climbing rope. If they are not capable of appreciating life and death situations that obvious, then they will not be capable of appeciating the much more subtle risks in the high country.

gnubbs

I went bouldering with Scott a couple of weeks back, and never blogged about it. In the interest of keeping as complete of a history of my climbing as possible, I thought I should add one now, even if it has been long enough that the details are fuzzy.

Bouldering is a brank of climbing that started off as a way climbers would stay in shape when they couldn’t get out for long climbs. Instead of climbing a long route, they would go out and find low problems (less than about 25′) and climb them unroped. Basically, they reduced climbing down to just the crux (hardest) move of a route. Eventually people decided this was fun in it’s own right and should not simply be relegated as a way to condition for real climbing.

So, there are a lot of people who boulder for the enjoyment of bouldering. Most problems are less than 15 feet tall, and if you fall you are going all the way to the ground. Instead of being long sustained routes, you focus on a couple of moves. The difficulty of bouldering problems is impressive. They have thier own rating system with the easiest problems being V0, and getting harder as the number increases. I am a solid 5.9 climber, but struggle on most V0 and V1 boulder problems.

So, Scott and I went out Bouldering at Mount Sanitas in Boulder. As we hiked up the mount, we came across about six different boulders. Each boulder had several problems on it. Although I attempted many of the problems, I was only able to send (complete) one or two of them. It was an interesting afternoon, but I didnt feel that I accomplished much. Oh well. That is just the way some days work out.

gnubbs