Until the next real post...

For those still paying attention, I'm going to write a big blog post soon about the recent places I've been such as Moab UT, Fisher Towers, Castleton Tower, Arches Nat'l Park, Bryce Canyon Nat'l Park, Zion Nat'l Park, Montana, Yellowstone and Glacier Nat'l Park, Seattle, the Oregon coast, Lover's Leap near South Lake Tahoe CA, San Francisco, Yosemite Nat'l Park, the San Diego Zoo, Albuquerque NM, the New River Gorge WV, and finally, Austin TX. I'm also going to upload some sick photos. Soon.

France, Gunks, Devil's Tower, Boulder, Indian Creek

Others too, in far flung villages,
Will no doubt be gazing at this moon
That never asks which watcher claims the night...
Loud on the unseen mountain wind,
A stag's cry quivers in the heart,
And somewhere a twig lets one leaf fall.

Zeami, The Fulling Block

A week living in the desert rock climbing gives you a lot of time to sit and watch the stillness and listen to the breeze. Fellow dirtbag climbers, bold lizards, and open range cattle for company isn't so bad. Rikka and I just got finished with seven days at Indian Creek and we're at periscope depth in Moab. Our hands are full of gobies and we are covered in a fine film of red dust, and I couldn't think of anything better to do than send a trip report. Rumor has it there are $3 showers at a hostel in town.

I haven't posted in a while, and I suppose I should start with some ramblings on France for a few paragraphs and follow it with a description of the past few weeks on the raod. After I got back from the Red River Gorge, where I went with the HMC undergrads during their spring break, my parents took me to France. We flew to Paris and spent three days there. Highlights of Paris included the massive and disgustingly old Notre Dame cathedral in Paris; the Rodin museum--dag that guy was good-- I think he's my favorite artist of all time; the Musee D'Orsay, which has tons of impressionists including massive amounts of Van Gogh and Toulouse L'Autrec; L'Arc de Triomphe and Champs D'Elsee; the Louis Pasteur Museum which, for those of you not in the know, commemorates the bro who basically invented everything that supports the pillars of modern society; the dungeon where they kept people about to be guillotined in the revolution; Napoleon's tomb; and the Jardins De Luxembourg, which is the Paris equivalent of central park, though of course way inferior. Every morsel of food we ate was very high quality, high in saturated fat, and ultra delicious. We ate at restaurants a lot, which is hugely different from my life right now on the road. By the end of the trip I was quite ready for rice and beans and pasta cooked on a pocket rocket every day so that I could get break even in terms of personal luxury.

After Paris we went south to a town called Blois and did a big bike ride. My parents, strong despite their old age, pumped the pedals twenty miles on a circuit to the castle of Chambord and back. I prompted my dad to tell me about the existentialism and modernism movements and that sort of thing. The one thing I think I liked about the ideas of existentialism was the weight they gave to the spontaneous moment of decision making. At that one moment when we decide something that could change our life, there is so much build-up and thought and calculation, yet the moment takes only an instant and is gone, lost on an impassive world yet changing our lives. I don't know if that's quite the point of existentialism but I think that moment is pretty cool.

After Blois we went to the Palace of Versailles which was mobbed with tourists. I got really stressed out about the crowds and rushed through the palace, but the gardens outside were incredible-- they were massive! Then we went to the Picardy region of France where the British entrenched themselves for hundreds of miles to fight the Germans. On July 1st 1916 about a gajillion british infantrymen charged to their deaths in an offensive that was supposed to end the war with it's unparalleled success. It was strange that the old battlefields are just farms now. I walked through a recently-plowed field and picked up several pieces of shrapnel from shell casings and small lead balls that exploded everywhere when the shell ripped into the enemy entrenchment. All the British colonies fighting at that time are now their own nations, and so each of the hundreds of graveyards is owned and maintained by a separate country. We met a handful of Australians who have made the pilgrimage to the battlefield of the Australian regiment several times. New Zealand had a park dedicated to their soldiers which was well-preserved and we actually walked the trenches where British soldiers got hypothermia and trench foot while waiting to become machine-gun fodder. I saw the cratered battlefield and imagined running up out of the trench to be mowed down by bullets into lifeless heaps.

After this amazing trip to France with my parents, we started in the Gunks four weeks ago to do some send-off sending with Karen and Dunbar. Their car stuffed to the brim, they were doing a final climbing binge before heading down to virginia. Company that weekend included Eugene, Lauren, Will, and Dave, although the sending continued all the way until Tuesday. Highlights included several girl-only leads by Karen and Rikka, a fine performance by Dunbar on MF and Birdland, and some 5.10's off my tick-list.

After visiting people in NYC/boston, Rikka and I set out across the cragless climbing wastelands of mid-state NY, ontario, michigan, wisconsin, minnesota and south dakota. We finally reached some mountain-like terrain in the badlands and the beautiful needles of South Dakota.

Upon reaching Devil's Tower, WY without a guidebook, we sought out "the guy" who lives in a house in the park boundaries and, according to the parks service, "runs a climbing business." We rolled up the dirt road to this guy's house and got out to knock on his door. A lady came out from behind the house and, when we told her we were looking for climbing info on the tower, she invited us inside the guy's house. Though she was extremely talkative, it took us a while to find out that she was a friend of the owner of the house, a guide whose name was Frank, living in her car in the backyard, cooking and doing dishes for him in return for hospitality and friendship. An hour later, Frank comes home and finds us in his house and warmly welcomes us and introduces himself. We tell him that we're looking to climb at Devil's tower for the next few days and he takes us in his car and drives down to the tower and walks around and starts pointing out a bunch of different routes for us to do. He doesn't seem to want much more than to just talk to us and make sure we know what we're doing. After spending two hours pointing out routes (several of which he put up) and giving us detailed information on them, he invites us back to his house for dinner and invites us to pitch our tent in his backyard! Our massive meal consisted of two salads, stew, biscuits, and was shared with two other climber bums from British Columbia. He let us help do the dishes, but otherwise we got a delicious hot meal, a flat backyard, good company, and a nice house to hang out in simply because we were there. Such hospitality is rare, and while I doubt it would have been as plentiful as in the summer when his B&B business is booming and he's booked solid with clients, it made Devil's Tower a really friendly place to visit. I'd like to go back and really climb the crap out of that thing. We did Durrance, a seven pitch route that summits the tower and got down by 1:30 in the afternoon before it started raining. Due to the rain, we decided to leave Devil's Tower without climbing any more days.

We then headed to Denver where we stayed with Adam Traina and climbed at Boulder Canyon and Eldorado Canyon, and scrambled on the Flatirons. At Eldorado we did Ruper, 5.8, 6-7 pitches with a wild approach, airy traverses, abundant death slabs between pitches, and an endless descent which rode the death slab-paved highway to an epic in the dark

After Denver we headed straight to Indian Creek. Proud on-sights were mingled with abject flails for an experience that was humbling yet scintillating and addictive. Highlights included lightning-fast cam stuffing repeatedly in endless sandstone splitters that were about a gajillion feet long. Notables such as the Incredible Handcrack and Supercrack were ascended. The rough dirt roads out to the lone desert six-shooter spires proved too much for rikka's prius, and hopping on-board a pickup truck full of climbers going to a different spire found us dropped off in the middle of the desert with a vague sense of which direction to walk. After several mesas, a natural cave/tunnel upward through a cliff, and a big talus scramble I was cruising fingerlocks up the direct start (10b) to the 3-pitch south face of the south six-shooter. We made triumphant poses on top, enjoyed the clear 360-degree view of Canylonlands national park, and sighted out a general path of return to the paved road 6 miles away. Preparing ourselves for the slog back through the desert, we happened upon a gang of retiree ATV riders crusing the desert. They decided that among the fourteen of them they had room for us to cling for dear life, so they offered and we accepted. Their machines sailed over every ditch and bump and outcrop on the way back, allowing us to get back to camp in time for a nap before beers around the campfire with the bros in the next site.

Next up: the Kor-Ingalls route on Castleton Tower, the Ancient Art spire in the Fisher Towers, some soft-rock spires in Arches National Park. Then Zion. Then Montana. Then Squamish in the first week of June with Hannah Waight, Katie Faulkner, and Tyler, then Yosemite later in June. Jeff and Monica will be joining us in Yosemite for five days of cranking.

Chronological Summary:
-Paris was awesome. Great food, Rodin Museum, Musee D'Orsay, Notre Dame Cathedral, dungeons.
-Blois for some scenic countryside, chateaus and bike riding.
-Palace of Versailles. Louis XIV was way too into himself, the palace was way too crowded.
-Picardy, north of Paris: trench warfare was messed up.
-Gunks with Karen and Dunbar, met by Jeff and Monica.
-Chilling and packing in NYC, visiting friends in Boston, visiting Mat Tobacco in Ithaca (wooo!).
-Niagara Falls is mind-blowingly massive.
-Ontario, Michigan, Northern Michigan, Pictured Rocks National Seashore is beautiful and the great likes are clear blue-green like the tropics.
-Visiting Rikka's friend Jen in Minneapolis for a weekend.
-Badlands National Park: moonscape, barren, rugged, bighorn sheep, a landscape that tries to tell you no human is welcome there.
-Mt. Rushmore and the Needles. I have to go back and climb there sometime, it's a rock playground in the hills.
-Devil's Tower, WY, the dude took us into his house and fed us dinner and we summitted the next day.
-Denver, CO with Adam Traina: sport climbing in Boulder Canyon, scrambling on the flatirons, epic long trad climb with horrid descent called Ruper in Eldorado Canyon.
-Indian Creek!
-Stay tuned for pictures of all these things and stories from Castleton Tower, Fisher towers, Arches, Montana, Squamish, and Yosemite.

Old Mexico and El Potrero Chico

Long time no post, but this post is crucial (feel free to skip to the end for a bullet-point summary). Pictures to come soon.

El Potrero Chico in Mexico is unlike other climbing destinations. After a month-long break in December to celebrate the birth of Christ our Lord and Savior and the beginning of the two thousand tenth Year of our Lord (which apparently has to do with the very same Christ our Lord and Savior) I was back and forth between family visits and relaxation on Cape Cod. I tried cross country skiing for the first time with Jeff, Monica, and Rikka, and played in the snow, but the rest of the time was spent indoors studying math textbooks.

On January 5th Will Skinner and I boarded a plane to San Antonio, where we met up with Hannah Waight, Eli Stein, and Sam Brotherton to get on a bus to Monterrey, Mexico. There, Hannah found us the bus to Hidalgo, which is the town at the foot of El Potrero Chico, which means "The Little Corral," and seems to refer to the massive corral-like hidden valley ringed by mountains, some of which have several-thousand-foot cliff faces on them. We arrived in Hidalgo at midnight, so I had no idea we were near mountains at all. At midnight in Hidalgo there were no cabs to take us and our big bags the four miles to the climber campground, and it seemed like we would be stranded for the night at the run-down bus station. We'd come so far to be stumped by the last four miles! But we finally succeeded at getting the manager of the bus station to drive us there. The five of us somehow packed our bodies and our packs into his tiny muscle car and tied the trunk down. The poor car bottomed out on every bump and couldn't achieve more than about 17mph. We rolled in at about 2am, pitched our tents, and rose in the morning to this view:

For the next three weeks we climbed nearly every day on well-bolted sport routes established mostly by Austin climbers in the past 30 years. I got sick for three days (there is a communal kitchen that is shared among 70 or so climbers at the campground and it helps colds circulate) and it rained a couple days, but otherwise the conditions were perfect. Dry, fairly warm, and not too windy most days.

Many days were spent cragging, systematically climbing several routes right next to each other, taking turns on much harder climbs and clocking mileage on 5.10's. But many days were spent doing multi-pitch. That's right, El Potrero has dozens of long bolted routes 5 pitches and longer. Most of them are much more than five pitches, the average is probably about 10 pitches. These make for some fantastic views at the top of pinnacles and the bolts and bolted anchors allow for really fast movement on the rock. We would climb a dozen pitches, half of which would be 5.10 or above, starting at 10am and be down at 3pm.

Sam and Eli climbed Timewave Zero two days before they left-- it is a 23-pitch climb with seven pitches of 5.10, two of them 5.10d, one pitch of 5.11b, and one pitch of 5.12a. Will and I climbed it two days later on a beautiful sunny day. In fact, it was so beautiful and sunny that the temperature climbed up to 84 degrees F and we ended up baking all day and getting dehydrated. The heat had us tired and weak and I had to pull on a couple draws through the 5.12 section, which is one pitch before the top. The whole thing took us about 13.5 hours-- we were at the top of the first pitch by dawn and we finished rapelling at about 8:15pm. What a great feeling.

Timewave zero was toward the end of the trip, and afterward Will and I were the only ones of our group left. We had a few more days of cragging, including a fingertip-tearing and forearm-pumping one where we cranked out three pitches of 5.12, one 5.11d, and one 5.10b. Three of these pitches were linked together on a three-pitch route in Estrellas Canyon called "The Devil's Tongue," and they were truly fantastic. Next time I'm in El Potrero I'm going to do all three pitches clean, with no falls. "Salty Dog" was another 5.12a we did that day, and I flashed it! Will tried it first, so I guess it's not technically an on-sight, but he went way off-route so maybe it sort of is? No matter-- I was proud. I'd gotten significantly stronger since the beginning of the trip.

One of the best parts about El Potrero is the people. It was so much more friendly and welcoming than the Red River Gorge, another popular world-class sport climbing area in North America with a centralized climbing community. In just three weeks I felt like I had really made some new friends and like I was really a part of the climbing world. There are a bunch of locals who actually live down there in Mexico and find various odd jobs to make money. Needless to say they are usually very strong and serious climbers, but they certainly do not have a chip on their shoulder. They're very interesting and friendly and excited to meet the new faces cycling through the place. I had the honor and privilege of being there are the same time as Matty McGovern and his pal Dudeman-- two of the sweetest bros I'd ever met. I have a strong feeling Matty and Dudeman will show up in my life several more times.

El Potrero is only about six hours of driving from Austin, TX, or maybe seven with the border crossing. That's weekend climbing trip status! I'll be going back.

I'm back on the Cape with Rikka now, studying math. Rikka works on weekends as a waitress, so we've been taking skiing and ice climbing trips during the week. You could say we're "weekday warriors!" This week we're going to Mount Washington in NH for the second time. Last time Dunbar and I climbed a sweet ice gully in Huntington Ravine-- it's such a gorgeous place and Karen and Dunbar are perfect caretakers.

Rikka and I may take a trip to the Red River Gorge in the next three weeks and try to overlap with some of the undergrads in the Harvard mountaineering club who are going there for spring break. Then, on March 28th my parents are taking me to France for 8 days! Cheese, wine, bicycling, and an expanded world-view-- w00t!

After France, Rikka and I are going on the road until it's time to move to Austin. Ithaca, NY (to see Mat Tobacco), Montana, Indian Creek, Yosemite Valley, Tuolomne, the High Sierras are on the list.

Stay tuned for a report from France.

Chronologically ordered summary:
-December in the Northeast with friends and family.
-Cross country skiing and playing in the snow.
-January at El Potrero Chico in Mexico, climbing my fingertips off.
-Back on the Cape with Rikka, working on my car, enjoying the solitude and calm.
-Maybe a short trip to Red River Gorge in the next three weeks.
-France with Mom and Dad!
-Heading west in April, on the road until moving to Austin.

New Mexico. Stuck in the Mud!

A forecast of several days of rain, clouds, and cold at Joshua Tree meant it was time to move on. Tomorrow, world class bro Nicholas James Stucky-Mack is going to arrive in Carlsbad, NM for a short stay with his dad. I’d been hoping/planning to visit Stuck for a while, so we set Thursday as a time for me to meet him in Carlsbad. After I left Joshua Tree, that still left me with Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to climb or otherwise occupy myself. The weather was uniformly terrible throughout the southwestern U.S., except perhaps for southern New Mexico, which, conveniently is where Carlsbad is. So I found a crag near Carlsbad (there are plenty) and fixated on it as my next destination. It’s called Last Chance Canyon and it’s a little over an hour outside Carlsbad, in the middle of the desert and the Guadalupe mountains. I drove late into Monday night and then slept in my car in a large open flat dirt area that I found a little ways off route 10.

I decided to break up my barren-desert-driving-full Tuesday by visiting Chiracahua National Park in eastern Arizona. It was about an hour off route 10, but I figured what the hell I’d give it a go. With Nic’s parks pass I got in for free and did a short hike (I ran) out to some sick grottoes. Chiracahua looks unimpressive as you approach it but as soon as you get into the valley nestled behind some mountains you see why it gets national monument status. I took a bunch of pictures that I will post soon, probably in slide-show form. The valley is full of thousands of small rhyolite spires poking up like worms from the trees. There was snow in the mountains and it was high enough that the trees were stunted. Altogether it was profoundly beautiful.

On the way out of Chiracahua I decided to take a “short-cut” through Pinery Canyon, which cuts through Coronado national forest to get back to route 10 considerably east of where I left it. Only problem is, the twenty mile road through Pinery Canyon is unpaved. I decided that even if my slow-going rough road “short-cut” would take three times as long as just going back to route 10 the way I came, it would be worth it for the sake of an adventure. So, as dusk rolled into the valley, I rolled into Pinery Canyon straight past signs saying things like “Unmaintained narrow winding mountain road ahead, enter canyon at your own risk” or, “rough road next 18 miles” or, “Gil, this is probably a bad idea in your little Jetta.” But the signs seemed more like a challenge to me than a warning. “How bad could it be?” I asked myself. After about five miles of pretty smooth, dry, and wide dirt road I was feeling pretty good. “This ain’t bad at all” I thought. After six miles I see a sign that say “Road Closed: Stop.” I certainly saw the sign and registered it, and I noticed that its tone was a little different than the previous warnings, but to me it still represented a challenge. Why was it closed? Was it really closed? Why were they telling me this after I’d already driven six miles in? I had to find out. I had the utmost confidence that whatever lay ahead, I could make it through. The road went up a mountain and got really narrow and windy. It got steeper as it went higher and wet melty snow started to appear on the road. I took curve after curve successfully and started to fish-tail now and then but was overall doing fine. My blood was pumping and as I got higher I got more and more convinced that I could make it all the way. All I had to do was keep going. Then it got a little steeper and the snow got a little deeper. My car stopped moving forward, even though I was pushing the go pedal. No go. So I carefully put the car in reverse and ever so slowly guided the car back down the road a hundred feet to where it was barely wide enough and dry enough to turn around. Then I coasted and skidded all the way back down to where it was flat. I was foiled. I don’t really know how far I was from the top but damn it I was close. I could feel it. After dark I got back to the paved road and went all the way back the way I came. Oh well. One day I’ll go back to Pinery Canyon and make it over that stupid pass. However it would seem in retrospect that these Pinery Canyon shenanigans angered the unpaved road gods, for I would soon have an epic that I wasn’t asking for. Read on because it gets more exciting.

After I got back to route 10 I drove for a long time in the dark. As time went on I decided that I wanted to get to Last Chance Canyon, my final destination near Carlsbad, before I went to bed so I didn’t have to drive before climbing the following morning. I underestimated how far it was to Last Chance Canyon, partially because google maps was incorrect and told me to take a road that wasn’t there. A combination of driving 55mph to get better gas mileage (I got 52 miles per gallon yesterday!), misadventures in Pinery Canyon, and the failure of google maps set me back enough so that I wound up finding the dirt road into Last Chance Canyon at 4:00am. I was committed. Relieved that my journey was finally over, I rolled into the three-mile-long stretch of dirt road. After 1.5 miles, things were looking and feeling good. It was rough, rocky, and wet from snow melt, but I had avoided getting stuck. Unlike the unrelenting uphill of Pinery Canyon, the Last Chance Canyon road had small dips and rises throughout. A combination of impatience, weariness, and daring had me taking the road probably 5mph faster than I should have and as I topped one small hump in the road it was just a moment too late that my headlights illuminated the horrible stinking mudpit from hell that was down the other side. I have posted pictures of this mud-pit: it pretty much consisted of two deep wheel ruts filled with water which get deeper and deeper and end up conjoining in a small pond after about 100 feet. Instinctively I aimed the right car wheel in-between the ruts and the left wheel up off the left side of the road. But the mud was so slipper and the ruts so deep and all-consuming that my car actually slid slideways and my wheels slotted down into the ruts. My momentum took me about twenty feet before the car slid to a halt. Much go pedal and go-backward pedal was pushed but the result was only a couple feet of movement forward and back. I was stuck in the mud-pit at 4:15am in the middle of nowhere by myself and freezing wind was howling through the shrubs. The adventure had found me.

Before trying any tricks, I decided to spend a few minutes trying to milk the car a few feet forward or back in the hopes of gathering up some kind of momentum either to get me backward up the hump or forward and up out of the ruts. Forty five minutes later I’d moved a little bit but only ended up more stuck. Next thing I tried was walking around gathering up sticks (they were sparse) and trying to wedge them under the front wheels so that the wheels would ride up on them and catch. This had no effect other than getting me muddy. I was worried about damaging the differential on my front wheels and getting mud everywhere and possibly in my air intake. At 5:30am I took the only sensible course of action: I laid down in the back of my car and went to sleep.

At 7:00 I woke up and found the wind stronger, the water in the ruts a slushy ice mixture, and the sun behind a giant cloud. It looked like the sun might gradually, with a lot of hard work, pop out from behind the massive cloud in a couple hours. I set about devising ways to extricate my car from the mud-pit before someone came down the road (if some climbers came down the road it would mean I’d have to accept help, which was a detestable idea to me). After trying to move back and forth a few inches at a time for about thirty minutes and finding it no more effective than the night before I tried to jack up the car thinking I might be able to get rocks or sticks all the way under the wheel. Placing the jack on a flat rock I started to raise the car but then the rock just slipped around in the mud. Jacking wouldn’t work. Then I decided to try and build a 5-to-1 haul system with my climbing ropes and carabiners to pull the car straight up out of the ruts. First I had to attach the towing eye-bolt to the front bumper, and this tiny task nearly foiled me because I did not know that the bolt screwed in counter-clockwise. What self-respecting bolt screws in counter-clockwise!? Any way, I made an anchor out of three large shrub/trees and set up the haul system from memory. I ended up making it a 7-to-1 haul system instead of 5-to-1, just to get some more mechanical advantage. I pulled and jerked and tugged and yanked and slipped and slid and pulled harder but it didn’t move the car. I pulled it taught, locked it off, then pushed the go pedal and then pulled again and locked it off and then pushed the go pedal again. Still the car did not want to move more than a foot or so, but I had at least gotten it back to the point it was at the night before where it could move back and forth. I disconnected the haul system and tried more forward-backward motion with the spinning tires. I got out of the car, ate some food, and slowly paced around in the mud thinking of other ways to get the car out. I figured that if I really couldn’t get it out I could jog the five miles or so back down the road to a set of buildings I remembered passing the night before to see if anyone might be available to help pull me out. But that was a last resort.

Finally I noticed that one of the bunches of sticks I’d put down the night before had gotten pressed down into the mud from some of the forward-backward motion. The sticks looked like they created a more frictionous surface in that one spot. I decided that I would try and fill in the mud-ruts for several feet behind my wheels so that if I were able to just get a little momentum, I would eventually catch the sticks and be able to gather more and more momentum. I made a real concerted effort to gather sticks and branches (only downed ones of course) and small pebbles and went about literally filling in the ruts behind my car. I did a thorough job of it and sure enough, when I got just a little bit of momentum backward, this time my car did not come to a halt as soon as it hit the hump behind it. The sticks were enough to give it momentum to get up on top of the hump. Back on the hump and out of mud-pit. It worked. I’d done it. I’d gotten out. I screamed to nobody in particular with glee and set about cleaning up my haul system and car jack and tools. I and my car were covered in mud. I backed up a bit more and did a sixteen-point turn in the narrow road to finally face the other way. Since the road ahead was impassable and I was feeling too spent to hike the rest of the way down the road to go climbing, I decided to drive back to the main road and gather my thoughts.

I decided to go visit Carlsbad Caverns National Park for some nice relaxing American tourism to let myself unwind a bit after my epic night. The Caverns were amazing: calming, astounding, awe-inspiring, massive, dank, impersonal. Tonight I’m going to back to the Last Chance Canyon road and sleep in my car nearby. Tomorrow I think I’ll hike into the canyon to finally check out the climbing!

I took tons of pictures of everything I’ve talked about in this post. I was very careful to document all the ups and downs of the mud-sticking experience. I will upload these photos very soon and point you to them. After I visit with Nick in Carlsbad I’m going to head back east and make my way back to New York City for Christmas time. This is my last stop in the west before New Years. It looks like I’m going to spend most of January climbing in El Potrero Chico in Hidalgo, Mexico. That’s all I’ve got for now. Thanks for reading.

Joshua Tree and Hermit Crabs

"Someone will say: And are you not ashamed, Socrates, of a course of life which is likely to bring you to an untimely end? To him I may fairly answer: There you are mistaken: a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad."

-Plato (in Apology)

Sure rock climbing is dangerous. If I make decisions that put me at risk of meeting an "untimely end," I would not be ashamed of them, but I would be rather embarassed and angry with myself. Climbing might be "right" the same way it is "right" to go to Church or meditate or pray. The only reason an "untimely end" would ever come into the picture is if a serious and completely avoidable error were made, and that would be just stupid. A lapse of judgement is something to be ashamed of, but living a life of challenge and triumph is not.

I ended up going to Joshua Tree in Southern California. Two nights ago, on the trip here from Vegas, I slept in a parking lot in the town of Lucerne Valley and was awakened by the Sheriff knocking on my window. He's a really nice guy and just wanted to check on what my deal was. After checking my driver's license on his computer, he told me I could go back to sleep! Yesterday I bouldered in the afternoon after buying a guidebook and exploring the park. Nic lent me his national parks pass, so I can get in for free. Last night I camped on BLM land just outside the town of Joshua Tree, which was free and private and desolate. My car is a roving home, since I sleep in it, so I'm like a hermit crab. It's a liberating existence.

This morning I woke up to frost and clouds. When the sun is hidden behind thick clouds it stays cold all morning. So I read books and took cover in Joshua Tree Public Library to await warmer afternoon temperatures. If it gets warmer I will head into the park to do some toprope solo-ing. Joshua Tree is full of piles of large, rough boulders. The friction is enormous and it'll rip holes in your pants real quick, and when it's cold (like today) it hurts the hands.

If the weather doesn't get better and I don't find any cool people to climb with, I might drive back east for an early Christmas vacation. Being on vacation full time is rough sometimes and I think I could use a vacation from it soon. But joking aside... this hermit/desert thing might get a little lonely soon. I only have a couple minutes remaining on my library computer session. Pictures to come soon.

Ran Away to Vegas and Climbed the Mountains There

"So ignorant are most landsmen of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory."

-Herman Melville (in Moby Dick)

If non-climbers were the same to me as "landsmen" are to Ishmael, then maybe I would think that my life as a climber is inaccessible or somehow closed to those who do not climb. But I am not an Ahab of the climbing world, I am not a climbing monomaniac; at heart I am a non-climber. I will say more about this later in the post, after I've done some reporting on my past few weeks. I'm sitting in a Barnes and Noble in Las Vegas that has free Wi-Fi, typing on my decrepit old laptop with fingertips hardened from two weeks of living in the desert and climbing pitch after pitch of rough sandstone. Here's a summary of the events leading up to this:

• After the Red River Gorge in Kentucky (which my last post was about), I wasn't ready to head west, so I went back to the Northeast, climbed at the Gunks in beautiful weather for a week, retreated to the Lovely household in Cape Cod to repair a coolant leak in my car, which I have named Agnes. At the Gunks I sent Fat City direct and Rikka led Yum-Yum and I sustained a wrist injury.
• My aunt passed away. Instead of heading west, I went to Trenton, NJ to attend the funeral. I love my family and I'm sad I missed our yearly trip to the New Jersey shore this past August (I was climbing in Wyoming). Solemn circumstances, but I got rare kid-free time with my older cousins. A shout-out to my brother Greg who showed up to the funeral better-dressed than I will ever be in my life.
  
• I stayed with my older cousin Megan in Washington D.C. after the funeral. I had exactly 2.5 days to make it to Las Vegas from here to pick up Nic at the airport. I hoped my car would make it across the country.
  
• I visited Anna Madden Francis McCallie in Charlotte, NC on my way to Vegas.
• I drove. For three days. I slept in my car in motel parking lots. I got up from my car in the morning, stretched, walked into the lobby and helped myself to the continental breakfast before heading on my way.
• Arrived in Las Vegas just in time to pick up Nic from the airport. We went to sleep and climbed 12 pitches the next day before picking Dora up from the airport at 3:45pm. A very sick climbing day.
• More and more Rensselaer Polytechnic engineers trickle into the Red Rocks campground every day. It was a great group. Katie roasted some turkey at home in Phoenix and brought it to Red Rocks. She also cooked stuffing and mashed potatoes, so we had thanksgiving dinner at the campground. A feast of feasts.
  
• The day after Thanksgiving Rikka arrived to help us climb the crap out of the mountains.

Now everyone has gone home and I'm still here in Las Vegas, trying to decide what I will do next. I'm thinking I might head down to Arizona to find people to climb with this weekend. I'm heading home for Christmas, so I'll be back east in a couple of weeks. If I can find people to climb with out West, however, I plan to stay out here alone for another couple weeks. All the people who flew out to Red Rocks for their Thanksgiving vacations put their leftover food items in a "for-free" bin at the campsite entrance, so I am fully loaded with at least two weeks' worth of food. It would be nice if I could try and use up the food before Christmas.

Nic took some great pictures of Red Rocks. Below I've pasted the link to his slideshow. Red Rocks is truly a great climbing location. It can be a little crowded because of its proximity to Vegas, but as far as long multi-pitch trad climbing, it rivals the Wind Rivers for commitment and airiness. It's less remote, though, so there are a lot of bolts and fixed anchors at Red Rocks. That said, there is a ton of rock unclimbed in addition to the thousands of documented ascents here and we all had our share of routefinding and approach difficulties. If it weren't starting to get pretty cold here and if I still had people to climb with, I could spend months here. How different Red Rocks is from the Red River Gorge, despite the similar color themes in their names.

Here's the link to a group of "best of" photos that Nic compiled on the trip. Being a far more talented photographer than I, he captured the beauty of this barren yet dramatically mountainous terrain, as well as the hanging-out:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dominic_albanese/sets/72157622926055386/show/

When people needed to go back to the airport, me, Rikka, Jeff, and Monica took a rest day to walk along the Strip in Vegas. We dove into some sensory overload at the famous mega-casinos such as the Bellagio, the MGM Grand, etc. Live lions, indoor gandola canals, and 1-cent slot machines abounded. I gambled away a full ninety-five cents! Prostitution is legal in 8 out of the 16 counties in Nevada, and Las Vegas is in one of those counties. Despite this astonishing fact, I skipped the brothels this time around. Something like 95% of the land in Nevada belongs to the federal government, including Red Rocks, and basically everything except Las Vegas and Reno themselves is desert. It defies reason that such a booming and heavily-consuming city as Vegas exists smack in the middle of the desert here.

Back to the quotation. I meant it to be a reminder that the White Whale or, to me, the unclimbed mountainous challenge, has little significance in this blog. Just as I don't give a crap about whale anatomy while I'm reading Moby Dick, whoever's reading this blog shouldn't care about what climbs I've done or how hard they were or the technical obstacles that I dealt with along the way. The descriptions of climbs I write here are to add color to the blog, but the ideas here are for non-climbers, for that is what I am. One day I will not be physically able to climb, and will not want to anymore. I'll want to retire to someplace pretty and hang out on my porch with other retired old bros and bro-ettes. When climbing is stripped away, it's what is left that matters. To take climbing as more than it is, but one source of adventures and fun, is close-minded. I am not and will never be a professional climber, I am not driven to bag those first ascents, I am not a monomaniac, I am not captain Ahab. My encounters with airy climbing moves, success and failure, athletic accomplishment, and the high lonesome are not important. It is the people close to me that are important, and the ideas I can share with them, and what I can produce in this world with my intellect. This trip reminded me of that. Take a look at Nic's slideshow.

Still at the Red

It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, "Always do what you are afraid to do."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm still here at the Red River Gorge. I haven't gotten on any 5.12's yet but I've been getting great workouts. This place is like an outdoor climbing gym. Safe, very little approach, very little adventure, tons of people on the routes you want to do, and all the pump you can handle. I can gradually feel my forearm endurance increasing. Nothing special to write about except large quantities of 5.10's and 5.11's on bolts. Today we took an "active rest" day, which consisted of climbing easy on 7's, 8's, and 9's on trad and bolts.

Tomorrow is going to be my last day here and Thursday will be a half day. I think after that I'm going to head back to New York or Cape Cod for a week, possibly visiting the Gunks, before heading west until Christmas. I'd love to spend another few days in the Gunks, and that would really give me something to write about. Since tomorrow is my last full day here, I decided I would hop on some 5.12's and see what happened. I know I won't on-sight anything, which stinks (on-sight climbing is where it's at for me), but it will be good to really test my athletic limits and see what happens at the next grade up, since I've never tried any 12's except at the gym.

I've uploaded and labeled some pictures. Here's a slide show with pictures from Seneca Rocks and the Red River Gorge. As before, be sure to click the icon in the lower right corner which makes the slide show full screen, and then click "Show Info" in the upper right corner to see the captions I've written on the pictures.