Grand Junction

When we heard the announcement that the annual Reel Rock Tour would be showing in Ottawa in November we were pretty bummed that we would miss it. We quickly checked out the tour schedule to see if we could catch it somewhere along our travels. We noticed that it would be showing in Grand Junction Colorado around the same time we were planning to be in Moab. Of course we also looked up any climbing we might be able to do in the area, and ended up visiting for a couple of days before heading back to Moab.

The Reel Rock Tour was of course fantastic. Maybe not quite as awesome as previous years, but still full of entertaining films. As for our own climbing, we checked out some of the bouldering in Unaweep Canyon, which is chock full of sandstone boulders. Here is Kristal on fossil rock, so named for the obvious bone imprint that she is holding with her left hand.

We also spent a day in Colorado National Monument, another beautiful destination, and climbed Otto's Route up Independance Monument, which is the thin tower on the right in the picture below.

This route actually has quite an interesting history. It was first climbed in 1911 by John Otto, a local with a fierce passion for the area. He lobbied for years to have the area designated as a national park, eventually succeeding, and acted as custodian of the park for many years. In addition to spending time and energy developing trails, he also made the first ascent up Independance Monument. Of course it was 1911, so the way he did it was by inserting pipes and chipping steps into the rock. The pipes are long gone, but the holes he drilled for them, and the steps, remain. You can see the steps clearly in this shot of the last pitch.

Today the climb goes in 4 pitches at around 5.8 . Here is Kristal just before the crux of the second pitch.

And just before the crux of the last pitch.

And hanging out at the top of the last pitch, with six feet left to go to the summit.

We were excited to find another summit register. Here's the obligatory shot of Kristal filling it out, with the town of Fruita in the background.

We did a bit of hiking through the park the next day. Here is Kristal tentatively standing on one of the many roofs that line the rim of the valley.

Arches

Our next stop was the Moab area. It would be a short visit, only two days in fact, but we would be back again shortly. The first day we spent in Arches National Park, which has some breathtaking scenery. Pretty much everywhere you look reveals beautiful vistas. We climbed two towers, the first being Owl Rock, up a nice 5.8 single pitch route.

Here are some interesting rock formations as seen from the top.

The next route we climbed was up Tonka Tower, which went at 5.8 A0, and became our first foray into aid climbing. According to the guidebook the aid climbing was minimal, and included a short section of climbing up a bolt ladder on the second pitch. We didn't have any aid gear, but figured we could easily wing it by stepping into slings. Thankfully we didn't have to resort to any such rudimentary techniques. We quickly befriended the party ahead of us, and they graciously left their Etries clipped into the bolts for us to use. Good thing too, as the 'bolt ladder' consisted of only two well spaced bolts on a minimally featured sandy face of rock. It would certainly have been interesting for us to get through that on our own. Here is Kristal at the summit with our new friends Ethan and Mike, with the tower next door to the right.

For the rest of the day we did some touring around the park. Here is Landscape Arch, supposedly the longest arch in the world, spanning 290 feet.

The ridiculous Balanced Rock.

And Kristal with Delicate Arch in the background.

On day two we did some bouldering at Big Bend, a small bouldering spot just outside of Moab, in the valley cut by the Colorado river. Despite it's small size, it contains a surprising number of quality problems, with an epic backdrop of sandstone cliffs.

Pictures

Before leaving Joe's Valley we finally got some better weather, although it was still bitterly cold at night. We spent two more days there, finishing up some projects and jumping on as many classic lines as we could. We got some pictures of a few of them.

Here I am on The Angler V2.

Kristal on Cave Man V4, a super fun problem that traverses out of a cave and up a cool overhanging arete.

Here I am just about to finish up The Buoux Crack V2, a committing problem if there ever was one.

Much of the scenery around Joe's Valley is pretty cool too. Here is a detached pillar from the cliff line overlooking the Area 51 boulders.

From Joe's we went back to Triassic and spent a day bouldering. We were pretty impressed with the quality of problems there. Here is Kristal on one of several great warm up problems on this wall.

We didn't have any sort of guide of the area. It was fun to jump on unknown stuff and just see how it went. Here is Kristal midway through an awesome unknown traverse problem.

Afterwards, through the miracle of the internet, we were able to figure out what some of the problems we climbed were. Here is Kristal midway up Golden V1.

And me topping it out.

And here I am on Desp'arete' V7, an incredibly reachy, and incredibly awesome, overhanging arete.

Happy Halloween!

While on the road for so long it's easy to lose track of time, especially when camping in the middle of nowhere, like we have been recently. It's often a struggle to remember exactly what day it is, and pretty easy to forget about upcoming special occasions. That hasn't been the case with Halloween though. Kristal has been obsessed with carving pumpkins for as long as she can remember. She has been planning her pumpkin for weeks, and has been paying special attention to our schedule to ensure we could be somewhere to get pumpkins in time.

We were able to find a couple of good pumpkins as we were leaving Joe's Valley, and yesterday we hosted our own pumpkin carving night after bouldering at Triassic.

Here I am making quick work of my simple, yet effective, design.

And another shot of us hard at work.

Kristal's plans were elaborate as always and a quick storm forced her to finish in the car. Thankfully the storm passed in a couple of hours and it turned out to be a clear night.

Here is the result of our efforts. I don't think I need to point out whos is whos.

And here they are outside of our tent.

We're currently headed to the Moab area and look forward to setting them up at our new campsite tonight. We hope everyone has a happy and safe Halloween!

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.

Salt Lake City

Our first climbing stop in Utah was at a local bouldering crag just outside of the city of Ogden, which is about a half hour north of Salt Lake City. It is made up of Quartzite boulders spread along the foothills of the mountains just outside of the city. Here is a picture of the city from one of the boulders.

We got on a few fun problems but put the camera away for most of the day. The real excitment of the afternoon came as we were leaving and saw two rattlesnakes at the base of one of the boulders we had just been climbing on half an hour before.

From Ogden we headed down to Salt Lake City, and figured we would spend quite a bit of time bouldering and climbing in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Unfortunately it turned out that all the public campgrounds in Salt Lake county, including the one conveniently located in the canyon, were already closed for the season. There weren't really any other nearby camping options either, and we ended up in a private RV park litterally 100 yards from the I-15. Needless to say, with the sweet, lulling sound of freeway traffic, the sprinkler system waking us up at 5am, and a half hour drive each way through the city to get to the canyon, we were pretty annoyed. Granted there are some advantages to urban camping, including showers, laundry and wi-fi, but in the end we could only spend two days climbing before hitting the road again.

The first day we spent bouldering, and climbed quite a few fun problems. Here I am on Fat Albert Gang V4, a really awesome arete climb.

The next day we decided we would climb the Indecent Exposure route up The Thumb, which is the peak just left of center in this picture.

At 9 pitches, and over 1000 feet of climbing, it would be one of the longest routes we had ever done, but it was graded relatively easy, so we figured it wouldn't be too bad. It turned out to be one of the most grueling days of climbing we have ever had. The 9.5 hour round trip from the parking lot, with 6.5 hours of climbing, weren't particularly atypical for one of our long climbing days. But the nature of the route, the two days of bouldering beforehand, and the long, steep and dirty gully descent all contributed to us being completely exhausted by the time we returned to the base of the cliff. Man, were we thankful for the hot showers at the campground that night!

In the end we climbed it in 10 pitches, skipping 2 of the pitches described in the guidebook and adding 3 of our own. Stuff like that sometimes happens. There were probably only 4 pitches that had what we would consider quality climbing, and some of that wasn't really all that fun. The rest was chossy, scrambly, and really not that great.

Here is Kristal on the wide and comfortable lunch ledge, 4 pitches up, when we still had some energy left.

Here I am heading out on the 5th pitch, which started with some really nice layback climbing and turned into some fun, but awkward climbing up a deep water groove.

Here is Kristal just after climbing the gruelling 6th pitch chimney. I think the look on her face says it all. The 5th and 6th pitches really took a lot out of us.

Here is Kristal just about to depart on the 9th pitch, much happier with the end in sight!

Even though The Thumb is only half way up the canyon wall, the views of the canyon and the city were pretty incredible. Pictures do not do them justice.

City of Rocks

There was one more stop on our way south to Utah, and it would be our first repeat destination from the summer trip. City of Rocks, Idaho.

There were still a couple of routes on our tick list that we didn't get to in the summer, and it was a convenient stop. We only stayed for two days, but got on some really nice climbs.

On day one we climbed to the top of The Lost Arrow. It was only two pitches, but it was an awesome looking spire. Here is Kristal on the first pitch, getting ready to commit to some incredibly exposed face climbing.

On the west side it was only a single rappel (barely, with a 70m rope) to get to the ground, so I was able to go down ahead and get this picture of her standing on the top.

On the second day, despite the threat of rain, we climbed some really good single pitch routes on Elephant Rock. Unfortunately we didn't get any pictures.

From City of Rocks we headed to Salt Lake City, and our first stop would be the REI. They were having one of their periodic '20% off a single item' sales, so we took the opportunity to replace some aging equipment. Our climbing rope had seen better days and our big tent was on its last legs.

Yup, we finally retired our big tent. Although we will miss the nice screen room, it was finally at the end of it's life. With a few more rips from this trip and the onset of colder weather, we didn't think we would ever set it up again. We picked up a smaller 4 person tent, which was still roomy enough to be comfortable, but would definitely handle the elements better.