Tomorrow we leave for Yosemite. Our 1 year anniversary! It’s going to be a long day. We just had an awesome party with our best friends. Thanks to everyone who showed up at our adobe. It was a fun time. Click on the pic to see the AWE$OME photos. We’ll keep ya posted for our Yosemite trip too…
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.
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.
Location: Beautiful pine forest setting of Flagstaff Arizona
Elevation: 7000ft
Objective: Get up off the couch and knock off the Annual Soldiers Trail Run. The 10K version!
Check out our pics and see how awesome the setting is for the race. Soft pine needles to run on, cool temps and a nice crowd of really psyched, fit people (runners, not climbers for a change).
….finding a two week and one day old hamburger wrapped in tin foil in the lid of your climbing pack and thinking it was a dead animal.
Sick.
Disgusting.
Absolutely revolting.
A gag-reflex parade.
Can the backpack be saved?
The past two weekends we’ve spent more time at home than out climbing – trying to play ‘catch up’ on the domestic portion of our lives – which, believe it or not, can actually be fun if you don’t do it that often! 🙂 We’ve undertaken some major yardwork tasks. The front yard had all kinds of irrigation running every which way….and leaking every which way as well. Leaking so bad, in fact, that we had actual GRASS growing in the front yard. Ahhh! Grass in the desert! What is this – Phoenix??!! (hehe, sorry). Anyway, the grass had to go and the irrigation had to be re-done. So that’s exactly what I did. I re-landscaped this one portion of the front yard, proudly simplifying the irrigation and replacing the grass and weeds with desert native bushes and flowers that need *very* minimal, if any, water. Click on the pic and see the ‘before’ and ‘after’.
Here are a few photos I snapped real quick right before the storm. Click the picture to see more.
Coffee doesn’t have much of an effect in terms of waking you up once you’ve had a million cups during the work week. I tried drinking an additional coffee on the way to Jacks Canyon last Friday night, to stay awake but it didn’t do anything for me. April and I were both exhausted. We bailed on the idea of driving all the way to Jacks to camp. My driving reaction time just wasn’t good enough to deal with elk dodging on the dark road. So, we stayed at Motel 6 in Payson.
Our weekend objective was to escape the heat of Tucson and get away from hot stuff, like the neighborhood blaze that nearly burned down our house. Since I’m so honest I told the attendant at Motel 6 that we have a dog and they kindly said, “Sure we allow pets. But, we’ll have to put you in a smoking room.” After a night there I smelled like “that guy” who sits down next to you after a fresh smoke. I always had that luxury when I was in lecture, in college.
Anyway, we left Payson on Saturday morning and drove up to Jacks. Since we were in total coffee withdrawl we got to the rocks around 12PM, lazy and with nice pounding headaches. Getting to the crag so early allowed us enough time to get in 3, count em, 3 Jacks Canyon routes! With just three routes to brag about at least April can say she…..onsighted a 5.11a!!! Nice.
Once the afternoon monsoon lightning storm passed we surfaced from the canyon to see that several forest fires were starting to burn on the horizon. Wow! Actually, once you’ve been living in Arizona for a little while, you see one fire, you’ve seen them all. Forest rangers were on their way in to put out the blaze as we drove out.
Drove out? Yeah, we bailed. We decided to head back to Tucson. Not! Ha ha. That’s not us. We stopped in Pine AZ and had dinner for starters. When we realized that there was a little cabin in the back that you could rent we couldn’t resist. Check out our photos and you’ll see, our weekend was all about chillin’, relaxing and then climbing hard at Jacks on Sunday.
The fire that is in the photo above is the view from highway 87 coming into Phoenix from Jacks Canyon. We saw the amazing forest fire as we drove back on Sunday. As we left the cool temps and returned to THE DESERT BLAZE.
