September 4, 2009
Oh, I am pumped-4 day weekend! Woot woot. Gotta love Labor day, the day of no labor, sweat, stress, or boredom, but of adventures and friends. Well, so I hope, I don’t have definite plans yet, but it sounds like a day of sport climbing with Kelly, Estabon and Rohan at the Monastery. No more chickening out, I will lead my first 5.11. And I’ll get over the whole lead fall thing-maybe I’ll make myself take a few (ooh, I do hate doing unnecessary damage to my rope).
Anyways, moving on. Last Thursday, the 27th of August, was a fantastic day at work. We finished the work at the new sunset campsite by putting in the footbridge, taking out a huge stone and a couple of trees. It was great because we got to work with Jim Dougan, who is always an energetic, fun guy to work with. He always amazes me. I wish I could be as spontaneous as he, with an endless storage of energy that needs so little to fuel or stimulate it.
Friday, I went climbing with Garritt, Christina and Brian Drew, down St Vrain Canyon at Monkey Skull (great name ehh? Funny how it sort of stands up to it). I led this 5.10 c right off that bat with my newly resoled shoes, and well, I took my second lead fall, but I blame it on equipment failure-apparently you need to break in the new rubber because it can become oxidized. Anyways, after climbing, Garritt, Brian and I went tubing through downtown Estes. Fair warning to all future tubers, tire tubes can make great inner tubes, but don’t get real cheap ones because they can pop easily (as Garritt discovered about 10 minutes into our trip-it was quite a funny site to see the explosion and him just sink. I laughed, so I suppose I deserve the next minute where I fell out of my tube at a rapid and had to dash out of the water and chase my tube down stream). This karma leads to my next warning: make sure your tube blows up equally on all sides (wait, I’m forgetting my geometry, circles don’t have sides…all turns? You know what I mean).-tubing on a lopsided tube is rather difficult-especially in rapids. Though it does make a good abdominal workout.
Saturday, I can’t remember. Sunday I went climbing at lumpy with Dave from trail crew. I did my third trad lead. Just need to work on my large gear placement and my trust in my own pieces.
Monday at work, Luke and I hiked to Big Meadows again and put some steps and water checks in at the Paintbrush and Sunset campsites. Tuesday, Luke, Kevin and I had the oh so enjoyable duty of carrying out crap with the llamas from the Odessa campsite composting privy. Which by the way was definitely failing at the whole composting thing-way too many users. Well at least we also got to do some tent pad work and Odessa Lake was in a rather beautiful area of the park.
Wednesday the crew was supposed to go on an overnight at Shadow mountain fire tower to take down the privies and burn them, but we got called late Tuesday night to go on a SAR 7:00 in the morning and after hanging around for about 45 minutes, we found out we weren’t really needed-so disappointing. So the trip was cancelled (partially because Tara was still on the SAR) and the crew headed back to the cache, cleaned things up a bit and hiked Twin Sisters-an easy little orientation hike. Thursday, our Shadow Mountain trip became the day trip, though unfortunately, the campfire part was not included.
Today, I got to go climbing at the monastery again-though unfortunately I chickened out on leading hard routes (partially because my climbing partner Luke doesn’t climb that hard, he has never caught lead falls, and I was tired), but I did do some fun classic routes.
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