A Day in the Life

8:00am

The alarm goes off. Today we are climbing Outer Space, one of Washington's supposed best multi-pitch trad routes, and we want to get an early start. I turn it off and roll back into bed. Perhaps we are tired from climbing the day before, or perhaps we've gone soft with too much bouldering, but for whatever reason we lounge around in the tent and read for a couple of hours, wasting precious daylight. Today the Friends of the Library would be our enemies, as we have become consumed with the recent books we purchased.

11:00am

We finally got our shit together. We are at the trailhead and ready to go. We start the long hike in.

12:00pm

We are at the end of the Snow Creek approach trail, the cliff we are about to climb looms in front of us. We still have to cross Snow Creek and scramble up the talus to its base. It does not look like fun.

12:30pm

The base of the cliff. We somehow missed the actual approach trail up the talus, and mostly scrambled straight up. The entire approach has been an ordeal in and of itself. 4.2 Kilometers, 1700 feet in elevation gain, 1.5 hours. We are not used to this.

There is one other party on the wall. On Outer Space of course. We will have to wait for them to clear the first pitch. The woman belaying has nice belay gloves on. We eat lunch and prepare. I hear footsteps behind me, another party come to wait in line? I turn around to see a mountain goat. He wanders around us, watching us. It seems as if he enjoys our company.

1:30pm

We finally start to climb. I quickly do the math in my head. 6 pitches should take us roughly 6 hours, putting us at the top at around 7:30pm. I don't remember when exactly the sun sets. We've traveled so much, the days are getting shorter. For some reason I think it's around 8:00pm. We should be able to do the half hour scramble down before dark. Assuming everything goes well, and the party ahead of us doesn't hold us up too much. Our mountain goat friend lies down on a ledge 10 feet away while I belay Kristal up the first pitch.

2:45pm

The first pitch does not quite go according to plan. Kristal unknowingly overshoots the belay ledge, something we learned later a lot of people do, it is not obvious when to cut left. She builds an achor and belays me up. Once I am up we realize our mistake. It is not easy to get onto the second pitch from where we are, so we downclimb a bit and then up again to the correct ledge. Route finding is sometimes an issue on long climbs, it is not all that uncommon, but I nervously look at my watch. We find a nice new belay glove on the ledge, assumedly dropped from the party in front of us.

3:30pm

The second pitch is a breeze. An easy fifth class scramble up and left. It is long though. Almost an entire 70m rope length. But we make up some time, which makes us feel better. The party ahead is still on the third pitch, so we would have had to wait anyway had we gotten there sooner.

4:30pm

The third pitch is a beast. The first half follows insecure flakes that vibrate and shake with every move. Will any of the gear hold? Don't fall Kristal. The crux finger crack traverse is burly and sustained. There is old abondoned gear all over this pitch. The cracks have eaten them up. There is also a nice new Metolius cam which easily comes out. Recently abandoned I assume? Probably again from the party ahead of us.

5:30pm

The fourth pitch is interesting and meandering. The middle section is runout face climbing. Not many places to place gear. I sling a small knob, doubtful of the sling's ability to stay on should I fall. I am hyper aware. Every move is deliberate. Every foot placement exact. There is little to hold on to. I welcome the crack up the side of the pedestal at the end of the pitch. The rope drag is horrendous. At the top I meet the party ahead of us, or at least the better half. I return their cam while I belay Kristal up. Kristal has her belay glove in our pack. Barbie will have to wait for it.

6:30pm

Pure climbing joy. A splitter hand crack on an almost vertical face covered with odd knobs. Kristal leads the fifth pitch, lamenting the fact that I will not be able to experience the thrill. I am happy to follow it. Incredible fun. When I get to the top Barbie is still on the ledge, belaying her partner. She has retrieved her belay glove from Kristal. I leave to start the sixth pitch on her heels. Light is fading.

7:30pm

I run out the sixth pitch, fighting the fading light. Pieces easily fifteen feet apart. The climbing is super fun, more climbing joy. I meet Ken at the belay tree and wait a few minutes for him to leave. He offers to wait for us at the top, so we can all descend together. I tell him that would be cool, but not to worry about us. They should take advantage of what little light remains. I belay Kristal up. By the time she gets here it is dark. She turned her headlight on halfway up. Despite finishing all the documented pitches there is still twenty meters of runout face climbing to the top. It's easy climbing, but in the dark nothing can be taken for granted. The sun set earlier than I expected.

8:00pm

We are at the top. It is pitch black. Ken and Barbie are no where to be seen. We start the descent.

Twenty minutes into it we catch up to them. They have one headlight between them. The are at a cairn but can't figure out which way to go. Left is too steep, right is impassable. I take a look. It is sometimes hard to see where the trail goes, but there are signs if you look close enough. I find a traverse to the left before the slab gets too steep. I follow it and eventually find another cairn. We are still on the right track.

The going is slow. We often have to wait up for Ken and Barbie, not too surprising since they are sharing a headlight, but they also seem to have substandard scrambling skills. We find a rappel station and rap down. Ken is the last to rap and screws things up at the top before descending. The rope is stuck. I have to jug back up the rope to go fix it. How do you screw up a rap? Good question.

10:00pm

The trail splits. I figure the left branch might take us back to the base of the cliff, where we can retrieve the other pack we left there. The right branch looks like a better trail, but probably goes all the way back down to Snow Creek, meaning we'd have to hike all the way back up the talus field to get our stuff. Kristal and I go left, Ken and Barbie go right. They have been up since 4am and just want to make it back to the car. They will get their stuff in the morning. Kristal and I offer to get it for them, assuming we make it there ourselves. We exchange phone numbers, in case something bad happens to either of us, and go our separate ways.

10:30pm

Kristal and I make it back to the base of the cliff. The left 'trail' wasn't much of one, but it had been traveled before. We eventually intersected the talus approach trail that we had missed during our initial approach. We collect our things, along with Ken and Barbie's packs, and head back down. Halfway down we see a headlight off in the distance. It is Ken and Barbie. They are bushwhacking through the woods. They lost the trail shortly after we split up. Why am I not surprised.

Are you on a trail?, they shout. Yup, we reply, the approach trail. We have your stuff. They are overjoyed to see us again, and happy to get their packs back. It turns out Ken works for Metolius, and gives us two new Master Cams for all our help. He insists. We all know that these two would have probably spent the entire night wandering around the woods, or worse, if Kristal and I hadn't been there.

11:00pm

We finally make it back to the main Snow Creek approach trail. I have never been happier to have a one hour hike in front of me.

12:00am

We finally make it back to the car. A 13 hour ordeal. Everyone busts open a Gatorade and chugs. We say our goodbyes after some reminiscing of the shared experience. We think they should stick to sport climbing for a while. We make it back to the campground and quickly cook up some Kraft Dinner. We have no energy for anything better.

1:00am

We finally make it to bed. Tomorrow will be a rest day.

Willkommen in Leavenworth

Ah Leavenworth, or should I say Little Bavaria. Yup, that's right, Bavaria. In the early to mid 1900s this place was much like any other small town, built up around the railway and lumber industry. Once those had moved elsewhere, it seemed the townsfolk decided that tourism would be the answer, so sometime in the 1960s, for no good reason other than because it seemed like a good idea, decided to theme the town Bavarian style.

It's pretty quaint to see everything (I mean everything - Starbucks, McDonald's, etc) themed in this way, and with Oktoberfest just around the corner the place is already starting to amp up. We managed to hit up the used book fundraiser downtown and picked up 6 books and a movie for a whopping $7.50, which should keep Kristal's voracious reading appitite satisfied for maybe a week.

On our way here we stopped in to visit my old friends from university Stu and Liz, now living in Seattle, whom I haven't seen since their wedding some ridiculous number of years ago. It was really awesome to see them again, reminisce about old times and meet their kids. They also graciously offered us to spend the night, which was a welcome change from sleeping in the rain. Thanks guys!

As we were reading the guidebook to Leavenworth bouldering, we were a little skeptical about its claims of being even better than Squamish. It's pretty common for guidebook authors to have a biased view of the climbing in their own backyard. Not that I blame them of course. I will always have a soft spot for McKenzie Pond in the Adirondacks, as a lot of people from Ottawa do, which view I'm sure is not always shared by visiting climbers. Even the bouldering guidebook to Squamish widly claims that all styles of climbing are well represented there, which is clearly not the case.

Anyway, it's always nice to be pleasantly surprised. Here is Kristal inside The Hueco Route V1.

The bouldering here is stellar, with an inordinate amout of quality problems, easy approaches, nice landings and an incredible amount of variety.

And the weather, oh the glorious weather! It's so nice to be out of the damp and dankness of the coast.

Every day so far has been sunny with a daytime high of low to mid twenties (Celsius of course).

We are also back to having an awesomely featured campsite, set up right beside Icicle Creek, with a nice little sandy shore to walk in for convenient bathing. Although, as I'm sure you can imagine based on the name, dips in the creek do not last very long.

The bouldering here is so good we have done nothing else so far, but next up we are going to jump on what is claimed to be one of Washington's best multi-pitch trad routes, Outer Space 5.9. We are pretty stoked for it.

Squamish

We've been in Squamish now for just over a week, and it certainly hasn't been without incident. To begin with, our ill willed relationship with local rodents is alive and kicking. There are mice all over the campground, which in and of itself is fine, they are actually pretty cute. Unfortunately they have figured out how to get in and out of our car, and freely do so, eating whatever we may have forgotten to properly put away. We were so annoyed we went to Canadian Tire and bought some mouse traps. We caught one of them, and relocated it far far away, but I feel it is a losing battle. They are everywhere.

More seriously, we were ancillarly players in pretty scary incident on The Chief.

We had met Alex and Rachel, both here on their own, the previous day. Rachel was camped beside us, so when we saw someone rummaging through her tent we were a little concerned. Turned out it was Alex. They had gotten together and been on the 5th pitch of Rock On, a route up the Apron, when Rachel fell. One of her pieces pulled and she ended up landing hard on a ledge, was knocked unconscious and was left dangling on the rope. Alex feared the worst, but she eventually came to, completely disoriented and not knowing who Alex was, or even where she was. Alex handled it extremely well and managed to get her to the ground and the hospital, abandoning much of his gear on the wall. With light fading and rain in the forecast, we offered to help him get his gear back. We had already climbed to the top of the Apron, so we knew the trail up. It wasn't quite as simple as that though, as none of us knew exactly where the anchors for the last pitch of Rock On were. Alex ended up having to lead a runout pitch of slippery slab to get up to the right set of ledges. We found a set of anchors that we thought were the right ones and left him to rap down and get his gear. Kristal and I then walked off in the fading light.

Thankfully, it all worked out in the end. The anchors were the right ones and Alex only had to rap down the last two pitches of the route in the dark. We were so releived to see him back at the campground. We were even more relieved when we picked Rachel up at the hospital the next day and, despite 3 stitches on her head and some nasty bruising and stiffness, she was in good shape.

On a lighter note, we have met a tonne of friends from Ottawa here. Our friend Travis just moved out to Squamish and we hooked up with him a couple of times to go climbing and bouldering. We also crashed at his place for a couple of nights when we arrived. Thanks Travis! There is also a crew of boulderers visiting from Ottawa that we seem to keep running into. It's pretty surreal to see so many familiar faces so far away from home. Out of the blue another friend, Matt, just happened to be in the area and climbing at the same crag as us. Small world!

On one of our rest days we hiked up to the top of The Chief. The views from the top were pretty awesome.

Oh, yeah, the climbing and bouldering here is pretty awesome too. At least when it's not raining. Here's Kristal on the 4th pitch of Diedre.

Unfortunately the forecast currently has pretty solid rain for the next five days. We were planning to spend a good 2 or 3 weeks here, but we can't handle the rain. We were too spoiled by the desert during the summer. Tomorrow we are driving to central Washington, to the other side of the coastal mountain range, where we will embrace the awesomeness that is the rain shadow.

Visiting

Since Kristal grew up in Alberta, we made several stops to enjoy the hospitality of her various family members. Although there wasn't much in the way of climbing, the awesome food and beds to sleep in more than made up for it. First up was her grandparents in Medicine Hat, which happens to boast the world's largest teepee. Yup, this is as exciting as it gets in the Hat.

We then made our way up to the small town of Oyen, where Kristal grew up, to visit her parents. On the way Alberta came through where Ontario failed. We spied a moose just off the road along the Red Deer River.

Next on the list was Kristal's brother Mark in Lethbridge. Thankfully Mark is also a climber and Lethbridge isn't too far removed from some honest to goodness climbing. Before we checked that out though we visited the Glenwood Erratic, another glacially displaced boulder sitting alone in an otherwise featurless landscape.

This boulder was actually pretty big and had quite a few problems. Despite the fact that it was a bit damp, and we eventually got rained out, we had a great time and climbed a bunch of cool problems. Here is Mark on one of our favourites, Sheep That Kick.

We then spent two days bouldering at Frank Slide. The bouldering is located in a large talus field that was the result of a landslide at Turtle Mountain in 1903. Approximately 90 million tonnes of rock crashed from the east face and covered 3 square kilometers of the valley floor. Here's a view of of what's left of the east face of the mountain.

It's a pretty unique area since the boulders were so recently created (geologically speaking). They haven't seen as much erosion as the boulders at most other destinations. The landings aren't quite as nice as we are used to though (we are spoiled), as there are rocks scattered everywhere, but with Mark along we had 4 crashpads, a luxury by our standards. Here he is on a couple of cool problems.

From there we visited one more galcial erratic, the Big Rock outside of Calgary, which has the distinction of being the largest in the world.

It's actually big enough that about half the problems are far too high to be comfortably bouldered. We just jumped on some of the cool shorter problems.

That night we drove to Calgary and stayed with Kristal's aunt Lana. It would be the last stop in our whirlwind tour of Alberta. The next day we hit the road and put a full day of driving to our first major destination, Canada's bouldering and climbing mecca, Squamish BC.

Prairie Bouldering

Manitoba went by in a blink of an eye, but we ended up staying in Saskatchewan for a couple of days.

Kristal grew up in the small town of Oyen, on the eastern side of Alberta, and knew of some cool places to stop. We camped out in Grasslands National Park. Being so far from anything, the sky was quite spectacular.

The next day we drove through the park and saw some of the wildlife. They re-introduced Bison there a few years ago and it was cool to see them wandering about.

There were also several colonies of Prarie Dogs. Thanks go out to my Mom for letting me have her old telephoto lens.

After Grasslands we headed up to the small (really small) town of Hazlet, outside of which is one of the few large glacial erratics in southern Saskatchewan. Despite the small number of problems it was pretty cool to be doing some bouldering in the middle of the prairies.

The next day we headed down to Fort Walsh and checked out the 'Mystery Rocks', which aren't actually that mysterious, nor very large, but we still managed to find a couple of problems to entertain ourselves.

We finally decided to shoot some video as well, something we didn't get around to doing in the summer. I'm not sure if we'll do this very much, as it does take up quite a bit of time, so enjoy it while you can!

Saskatchewan Bouldering? from Jason Allemann on Vimeo.

On The Road Again

It was nice to be back home for a couple of weeks, sleeping in a bed and hanging out with friends again. I took a trip down to what is still one of my favourite bouldering spots, McKenzie Pond in the Adirondacks, with a large contingent of Ottawa climbers.

I also went up to Lac Boisseau, a cool little sport climbing destination in Quebec, with Mixa and Travis. Here is Travis leading the super fun Viagra Crimpy Monkey Slap 5.11c.

I made it out for lunch with the old 'Friday Lunch' gang from Corel. Here you go guys! It was awesome seeing you again.

I was planning to stay in Ottawa a bit longer, but there was a lack of manpower back home on the farm. I headed down for a couple of days to help take off the hay and extract some honey. Kristal was dying of boredom in London so decided to stop by a bit early. Little did she know she would also get roped into doing some work.

But the road was calling us, so, after an 18 day break from the last trip, we were off. This time we were heading more or less directly west to the coast, with our first major destination being Squamish, British Columbia. Despite the amount of driving in front of us, I managed to convince Kristal to take the long way north around the great lakes instead of cutting through the States. We also decided we would take our time and see some sights on the way.

Highlights of Northern Ontario included the enormous Geese sculptures in Wawa.

Kristal was also a big fan of the Winnie the Pooh display in White River. This was where Lt. Harry Coleburn purchased the black bear cub he named Winnie, which would later become the inspiration to the beloved children stories.

The north shore of Lake Superior is also quite spectacular.

We made quick work of Ontario, making it most of the way through by the end of the second day. One of the goals of driving through northern Ontario was to see a moose, but sadly, despite the taunting of hundreds of road signs, it was not to be.

The End of the Beginning

Devils Tower would be the last destination of the trip. From there, we drove three days straight back to Ontario. The drive was pretty uneventful, although the return to real humidity was a bit of a shocker. Somewhere outside of Chicago we stepped out of the car and were immediately drenched with sweat. The thought of sleeping in such horrible conditions did not appeal to us. We got a motel for the night.

We didn't pass up one more opportunity to tie into a rope though. While we were at my parent's, unwinding and cleaning out Kristal's car, we were solicited to clean out the chimney of the wood stove. Here we are chilling on the roof, anchored to the old brick chimney.

And here I am, being belayed by Kristal, exercising my expert chimney sweeping technique.

The trip was incredible. In 4 months we traveled 20589 km, visited 20 destinations in 13 states, and spent 83 days climbing.

We amassed a nice collection of shoes (Kristal more so than I), most of which are in desperate need of being resoled.

We also amassed a mighty collection of guidebooks.

We keep pretty detailed logbooks of everything we climb, more for our own curiosity than anything else, but for those interested, here are the final stats...

We spent 41 days climbing routes (32 trad and 9 sport). In that time we climbed a total of 128 routes (74 trad and 54 sport), with 177 total pitches, ranging in total height from 30 to 740 feet and difficulty from 5.2 to 5.11b.

We spent 42 days bouldering (I win!!). I sent a total of 406 problems ranging in difficulty from V0- to V6. I don't have Kristal's numbers but I'm sure they aren't much different.

We'll be home for a couple of weeks before hitting the road again in early September. In the meantime I may or may not post anything here. It depends on if anything interesting happens. I'm looking forward to climbing some of the local areas around Ottawa again. In the fall we are planning to head out west again, to Squamish, eventually to Utah, and anywhere else the road takes us.