Climbing Colorado

Climbing, hiking, biking, skiing, cats, mostly in Colorado. Check out my primary tumblr, physicsinprogress.

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Descending from sawtooth

Page 5: You see a Cairn in the distance.

Do you walk to the Carin? Go to page 12.

Do you wander off in another direction? Go to page 13.

Page 13: You find a Cairn. Go to page 12.

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From the decent on the Sawtooth Ridge between Bierstadt and Evans. I was in way better shape when I did this last year.  This year I was dragging ass and didn't play around with the scrambling on the ridge as much as I would have liked.  But we stopped to take a 30 minute nap in the alpine meadow near our sword fight.  Then we found 3 possible first ascent VB (aka easy) boulder problems on the way down.

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MoNika Ell warming up.

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Christmas in Yosemite. Warm weather, cold water.

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Eldora like 2nd day of the season. No lines.

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My climbing partner at the top of the Spearhead in Rocky Mountain National Park. Possibly my first real alpine route, 4 hour approach, 4 hours of climbing, 4 hours out. Probably in summer 2012

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So I've been lazy about taking pics and posting about outdoor activities.  Since the last post I've discovered Staunton State park has nice mountain biking (when I say nice, I mean super easy, the way I like it).  Also did a walk around tour in Staunton to check out some of the climbing, and the access for it.  Did the Dirty Bismark twice, another super easy mountain bike ride, but kinda long, like 14 miles.  Climbed the Young and the Rackless, a super fun 4 pitch 5.9/5.10 (depending on height) sport route, which includes basically climbing through a golden eagle nest. Did a day at Abasin to test out my new skis, that was my first time every bothering to do any early season skiing.  Booked a room up a Beaver Creek for MLK weekend.  Got my Epic Pass (includes Eldora, booya). Did a whole course of PT for my knees, which basically involves working on my quads.  Fucked up my elbow to the point where it hurt after sleeping.  Mostly fixed my elbow via rest I hope, still taking it super easy at the rock gym. Ohh and I went with my friend to climb Dementia which is 10a hand/finger crack route at Happy Hour. I was a shit show that day, I managed to follow Dementia fine, but I bailed off both of my leads, dropped some nuts, forgot the nut tool both times I needed it, and stole shoes from the people climbing next to us temporarily. I might start posting again, who knows.

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A windy weekend in Vedauwoo. Top photo shows the rope blowing in the wind hanging from the but Mike bailed from. It was gusting up to about 50 mpg, which was enough to make us stumble on the walk out, I'm sure it was terrifying in lead.

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Two days of climbing in Buoux (bee-yooks) capped off by getting rained out. This was apparently where all the hard sport climbers climbed back in the day. Our guide book had an area where like 20 routes in a row were 7b (12c?) or harder with nothing easier. We climbed the easier stuff. The grades were definitely harder than Boulder Canyon, and I wasn't prepared for run out slabs, do there weren't any big sends, just lots of fun climbing. The crack line in the photo is La Beda 6a+ (5.10b?). It felt a lot harder than 10b.

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Climbing at En Vau, in the Calanques near Cassis France. We started hiking at 6am. My busted toe felt fine, surprisingly. Despite accidentally taking a longer path than necessary we're the first group to En Vau. Top pic is me eating breakfast, our route starts about 150 ft behind the camera. The middle and bottom pics are from our third belay. The middle pic shows another wall full of routes. The bottom shows the final pitches of our route. If I had a few more draws (19 I think) I could have linked all the final pitches into one. The route was about 5.9, all bolted, and sometimes super polished rock. It topped out near the trail out, which is part of why we chose it. The Calanques were only open 6-11am, so we didn't have much time. We actually didn't make it out in time, but we passed people hiking into En Vau on our way out, so we clearly weren't the worst offenders. Then we hiked back to the nude beach by our hotel and jumped in the ocean. This might be the coolest place I've ever climbed.

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First day in France

The first day of our vacation in France, we wake up in a seaside village called Cassis. We're planning to hike out to these cool coves called the Calanques and do some climbing. We head to nice breakfast prepared by our host at about 8am, and are disappointed to hear that the Calanques are only open from 6am to 11am today. So we decide to prepare for a 6am start in case the same thing happens tomorrow. So we head out on a casual walk around town, in flip flops of course, and make sure to walk by the trailhead well take tomorrow. BLAM. FUCK comes out of my mouth as I kick a rock, with my big toe, since I'm wearing the flops. I'm swearing, and walk over to sit down until it stops hurting. My wife asks "are you ok?". "Yeah I'm fine it just hurt.. wait no." I'd bothered to actually look at my toe, and there is a huge hole in it, over a flip flop covered in blood. "Holy shit I think I might have ruined our vacation, my toe looks really bad". So we I hobble back to our hotel, and sit in the shower to rinse off blood and bandage up the toe, hoping its not as bad as it looks. After about an hour of resting with the foot elevated I started walking around again, and it only hurt a little. So we headed to the beach below our hotel, which turns out to be really nice, and a nude beach. The beach is just flat smooth rocks, which are nice to lie on, and don't get up in your junk like sand. My bandages all fell off after 5 minutes in the ocean, but I think it cleaned the toe out really well, because I was able to tape down the tie flapper much tighter when we got back to the hotel. I felt like you'd rather not see a bloody toe, and its probably not cool to take pictures at the nude beach, so you get a text post. Stay tuned for pics from climbing in the Calanques with my toe flapper.

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We hiked up to Lake Gibraltar, which included some fun stream crossings. It was like 18 miles round trip, so my knees weren’t very happy. The last mile or so was mostly off trail, which is my favorite sort of hiking. I think it would be fun to try to go cross country from the lake back to a few waterfalls a mile or so back. It's actually one of the flattest hikes in Boulder county with only 1600 ft of elevation gain.

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Hiking with a two year old nephew means we go kind of slow, so I stopped to smell the flowers.  

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Hiking with a two year old nephew means we go kind of slow, so I stopped to smell the flowers.  

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Hiking with a two year old nephew means we go kind of slow, so I stopped to smell the flowers.  

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Hiking with a two year old nephew means we go kind of slow, so I stopped to smell the flowers.  

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Rewatch the live-stream from the sweet deep water solo competition that just went down in Utah.  In case it's not clear, the format is single elimination.  They climb in pairs, and you just need to get higher than the person you are up against that round to go on.  Speed breaks ties.