Labor Day in Flagstaff
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.
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on Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Bouldering, Flagstaff-Arizona, Mt. Biking, Photos, Running.
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