apAdventures

Sorry for the apadventures neglect. Things have been quite busy around here lately. So this entry will be a quick a dirty summary of what we’ve been up to over the past few weeks:

1. Grit. Grit is our new bud living in our guest house. She’s here from Germany for a few months working at the university. I met her at the gym one night and turns out we have a common friend from Germany. Small world. Anyway, not only are we psyched that she’s as psyched as us about climbing, but she also likes to run! and run and run and run. Grit, Paul and I just ticked off a 7.5 mile’r this evening. Whew. Paul and I finally broke the 7 mile mark…just barely. 🙂

2. Climbing. Climbing has been stellar as usual. We’ve been frequenting Flagstaff lately. Hitting up Priest Draw. The weather up in Flag is gorgeous…crisp fall wind and getting rather chilly at night. Can’t wait for the aspen leaves to turn. Last weekend Paul, myself, Grit, and Morgan went up with Miles who is real good fun. He helped develop the place a (few) years back and showed us some stuff we’d never seen before. Cool! Paul is still taking it easy on his finger that he tweaked back in May. But how easy can you take it when you’re climbing on Priest Draw pocket roofs? 😉

3. Training. We’ve got the campus board up!!! Grit and I started building it the weekend before last, Paul stained it with some nice weatherproofing stain, and just before we left for Priest Draw last weekend we finished it off. It stands tall and proud out back by the mamma woody, looking oh-so-good. The woody has been stripped and re-set. Courtney, Grit, Paul and myself spent a night last week eating those new peanut butter double stuff oreos and setting new problems. And this past weekend we picked up some cheap 2nd holds from Voodoo. Now if we could just find the time to get some cushy mattresses so we don’t have to “Climb At Your Own Risk” each night.

4. Biking. What?! More biking you say? Well, kinda. I *finally* succeeded in getting myself motivated to ride my bike to work and back last week. I only did it 1 day though, so don’t ooo and ahh yet. My butt was waaaaay to sore to climb back on the seat so soon. We’ll see how this week goes.

5. Morgan. Cute.

6. The adobe. Still hanging in there. Our list of home fix-up to-do’s keeps growing. The bathroom sink has been clogged for 5 months now. Brushing your teeth in the kitchen is not so bad…..

7. The old ball and chain. A major smoochy smoochy weekend is coming up for Paul and I. Oct 2nd will be our 1 year wedding anniversary! Amazing that one year has already gone by. What a fine year too at that. If the upcoming years will be anything like the first, I think it’s safe to say I made a real darn good pick with that Paul, heh heh. Anyway, we plan on spending it in Yosemite. CAN’T WAIT.

Here we are in Flagstaff, Arizona, sippin’ coffee and resting our weary selves at the Late for the Train coffee shop. Our extended weekend started off yesterday, Friday. We slept in at home in Tucson, then packed up our climbing gear, running sneaks, and mtn bikes and hit the road. “Whoa, wait a sec, mtn bikes?!” you say? Yes, I’ll admit, we’ve pretty much given up the mtn biking scene since we moved out west…..for the sole reason of obsessing exclusively over climbing. But lately we’ve had the itch. And we *finally* acted on it.

We arrived in Flag a little later than expected on Fri, so we decided to set up camp and finish the day off with a beautiful run along Lake Mary. Absolutely beautiful.

This morning we headed to Priest Draw for some bouldering. I guess the Flagstaff boulderers are late sleepers b/c we were literally the only ones there until about noon. Sweet. I had the boulder problem Anorexic all to myself. Highlight of the morning was me FINALLY sending the V4 traverse on the warm-up triangle boulder. For those of you that have seen our “Desert Bouldering” video, this is the problem where I fall at the end, right before the finish. Falling at the end was a trend for me many many times….so I was psyched.

Paul found this two move wonder near The Egyptian. First move is a dyno. Second move is a heinous mantle top-out. I got great butt crack footage of him beach-whaling over the top of the boulder, hehe. Once you grab the top of the boulder, you have to throw a heal up and then basically turn a lock-off into a mantle all in one motion, cause there’s no holds on the top. I was planning on opting out on trying this one, but since I was laughing so hard at Paul’s dramatic finish, he said “Now your turn.” The dyno was a no-go for me. But I make-believed the dyno and tried the mantle…..and did it!!! Must be all those pushups are paying off.

We bouldered from about 8am to 2pm, and then drove up to Shultz Creek trail to see how hard we could get our butts spanked on our mtn bikes. We started off up this super super rocky/bouldery single track. DAMN we’ve lost our skills!!! This trail is HARD! Turns out, we were on some Burrito Barfer trail or something like that….one that’s rated with skulls and stuff for the hardman biker. Whoopsies. Now where is that trail Miles recommended (the classic 5.9 of mtn bike trails, as he puts it). Pedal around a bit more, and finally we come to Shultz Creek trail. Stellar dude. After a mile or two we had our game back and were bouncing along through some modest technical sections. Waahooo! Why was it again we’d given up on biking? Oh yeah – too much time bouldering at Hueco. 😉

Well, that’s the scoop for now. We’re going to chow down tonight and get some good rest and do it all again tomorrow.

Here are a few pictures so far.

After telling story upon story about the bouldering mecca Hueco Tanks, we had to prove to our new friend Grit (from Germany) that we weren’t lying. She’s been climbing for three years but has never tried bouldering and was really psyched to see what the best bouldering in the U.S.A was all about. Turns out, Grit is a true boulderer.

It all started at a little get-together we had Thursday night with our climber friends. We got so psyched that we decided to leave for Hueco the next day and take our chances with the weather. Some friends said, “Dude, why go? It’s gonna be like 110 degrees out there.” I said, “No way man, it’s gonna be cloudy and about 80. Perfect for summer climbing.”

Turns out…it was cloudy and PERFECT!!! We spent Saturday on North Mountain re-visiting the classics and showing Grit just some of the hundereds of amazing lines that Hueco has to offer. On Sunday we joined some really nice new friends on an observation tour which led us to “The Gunks” and to the “Sausage Factory.”

Here are a few photos of the weekend but the video should capture the fun and excitement better. We’ll have footage up in a couple days.

Our Texas Ranger bush is in bloom! Look quick while you can because it only lasts one day.

Paul and I (and Morgan!) decided to head up to Bishop, California for a 4-day weekend of bouldering.

Here are a bunch of photos documenting the journey

We left after work on Thursday evening and blasted up to Mt. Charleston outside of Vegas to camp at the brrrrr elevation of 7500 feet. Silly us decided to leave our sleeping bags at home – anticipating warm Bishop weather – and just slept with a comforter. Whoops. Brrrrrrrrrr.

On the way to Bishop the following morning, we decided to side-trip it to Death Valley, since I had never been. Giving up a 1/2 day bouldering for a hot dusty tour of the lowest point in the US sounded appetizing given that we had each downed about 10 cups of coffee the night before and froze our butts off in the tent. Ahhh, hot desert ahhh.

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Tonight we had a small woody session at our place. Myself, Paul, Tammy and Vince. It was a good and fun night, although the energy was a little low – perhaps thanks to either the beer, or the detailed poop conversation…complements of Vince.

Here are a couple pics of us pulling down on the woody.

For those non-climbers:
Woody = Homemade climbing wall. Typically built out of plywood and 2x4s…hence the name “woody.”

It felt so nice to go back to Hueco again. It was also nice to climb with Vince and Tammy again. April and I had been spending our weekends doing so many other things for over a month but we managed to clear our busy schedule and go back to our favorite bouldering destination. We geared our minds to believe that the weekend was devoted to doing a lot of new problems. It was a good idea because we couldn’t tell how out of shape we had become. We spent 3 days bouldering and the park was basically all ours.

Check out our photos…

Arizona is the best!

Last weekend was part 2 of April’s parents’ Arizona visit. Paul, Vicki, April and I all traveled to Sedona for some beautiful sightseeing. We spent Friday touring the town and then headed up to Flagstaff for two days of skiing at Snowbowl. We didn’t expect much. In fact, it is very hard to imagine how good skiing could be in April. But, to our surprise, it snowed Saturday and we managed to ride in what we considered the best conditions we’ve ever experienced.

Check out our photos…

I’ve been putting photos on the site by following a very tedious methodology.

1. Get pictures off camera
2. Save them to a folder on my local computer
3. Edit their sizes in Paint
4. Save a “big” size and “small” size
5. Upload the two picture sizes
6. Reference the pics when creating a new entry

Now, thanks to my friend Matt, we’ve implemented “flickr.” CHECK IT OUT! Posting pictures is going to be really fun and organized now.

We waited in suspense all day but finally, our new furniture arrived! Check our our sofa, love seat, coffee table and end table. There are also some photos of our new table cloth. We’ll need to do some serious relaxing after tomorrow. Tomorrow? The Hueco Tanks “Wanker”…