All Good Things

All good things must come to an end. We just didn't expect it to happen so soon.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We've been in Joe's Valley, in central Utah, for a week now.

On the first day here we came across this roadsign covered with climbing stickers, right next to one of the areas. Here I am making our own contribution, adding a Spoken (spokenbags.com) and IMBoulderer (imboulderer.com) stickers. Ottawa represent!

Joe's Valley is actually a pretty awesome bouldering area, with numberous collections of sandstone blocks, containing many awesome boulder problems. Unfortunately the weather situation has left a little to be desired. Since we've arrived it's been cold, and pretty much constantly overcast, with rain and/or snow on the verge of falling at any given moment.

One night it started raining pretty hard and we noticed that there was a nice stream running under the tent. Here I am digging a moat around the tent to divert the runoff.

One morning we woke up to this. This is not how it's supposed to be.

Thankfully the amount of actual precipitation hasn't been that much, and we were able to boulder 3 of the first 4 days. It doesn't make for very pleasant sessions though, when it's cold, dark and intermittently spitting rain. We weren't really in the mood for standing around taking pictures.

At one point the forecast looked pretty grim, but we were actually in need of a couple of rest days anyway. We decided to go into the big city of Price, get a motel for the night, and enjoy the glorious world of the inside. A hot shower never felt so good. The next day we took our time getting back and stopped in to check out another nearby destination, called Triassic, that I had just found out about while online at the motel. We didn't seriously try any problems, but sussed out a few of them. Here is Kristal contemplating the first moves of one cool arete.

We saw a lot of problems that looked really cool, so we will be back to check it out.

During our little 'vacation' it became obvious what the problem with the weather was. Joe's Valley is on the eastern edge of a range of mountains. Unfortunately not eastern enough to be in the rain shadow. This is the view of the mountain range from Triassic, where it was nice and dry and sunny.

You can see the solid band of clouds hovering over it, dumping rain and snow, before breaking up as they came east. As we were driving back to Joe's we lamented leaving the nice sunshine and going back into the clouds. As we pulled up to our site, to find our tent destroyed from the the previous night's wind, it started to snow.