Vicarious climbing fun.

Last weekend a couple friends were coming through town headed to Moab and Indian Creek for the week, so a few of us joined in for the weekend.
Somehow they conned me into leading Jim Beyer's solo first ascent, "Right Side In" on Wallstreet. Mainly, I had to test out my ginormous 8.5" homemade cam.... and I'm a sucker for offwidths, even though it was my 5th lead for the entire year.


The offwidth was kinda enjoyable,in that terrifying exhausting way, but then, it ended in a blank corner about 15 feet from the top. So, being the old boring scaredy cat I am, I pulled on gear (even more....) then tied up a couple 4' slings into wanna be aiders, and got a couple moves higher, then had to free climb, or attempt too. This might have stumped me on my best day, but that day it scared me to no end. So after tooling around a while trying to figure something out, I called for a rope from the top and got out of there. Silly face climbing (with a giant hollow loose flake) stumped me again.

I also conned one of the guys into taking a few test whippers onto my homemade #3 cam.

Then Monster Cam got some more action on Castleton Tower, where I was privileged to bail a few years back(the last two pics). But this time at least my cam got up it.


Now that's an Indian Creek Rack!

Friends and Mountains

Last weekend Fritz and I went down to Lake City, and did a bit of climbing and hiking with Steve. Kinda nice to get off the bike once in a while, eh?
We did some climbing at a top secret area we've developed. We all ran a lap up THE definitive route there, goes from fingers layback to hands to wide hands or fists to thin offwidth to knee jam size offwidth. I've been climbing so little it felt harder on toprope then it used to on lead...
Here, Fritz gets an introduction to crack climbing.


Then we rigged a top rope solo line on a fun looking chimney I never had the guts to lead. Its a good thing, I cleaned some gigantic rock flakes of it on rappel. Rock shrapnel was found over 100 feet from the base of the climb. Once (mostly) cleaned, it proved to be a great chimney/bush/offwidth/handcrack climb.

And, just for fun, here's a couple pictures from 2008 when I XC skied in 8 miles, solo aid climbed Rack in Order, then skied back out. Oh, the energy of youth.


Then Sunday afternoon we all took a quick hike up Matterhorn Peak




Then this weekend I took "off" so no big crazy trips, just some sewing (bar bag, seat bag, and top tube bag to a Salsa Fargo), finished building a bike wheel in Solidworks, and actually had a bit of a social life!

Getting the spokes to go in correctly took 4 different spoke files with different angles at the elbows. The hub I drew up last fall for CAD class. Its all true to life dimensions (pretty close), modeled off my own rear wheel, a DT 240s hub, Stan's Flow rim.



And a CAD Cam in fruity colors...



Oh, and Tuesday I hit 1000 miles on the commuter bike, since school started in August.
Back to this stuff tomorrow morning!