apAdventures

A quick recap of a jammed packed spring:

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And capping off our busy spring craziness:

Watch out summer, here we come.

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Gymnastics meet in Phoenix followed by Hueco bouldering in El Paso. 😳

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When the opportunity presents itself, snatch it and run!

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Starting the year off with a great run on a gorgeous desert day.

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…and I don’t mean skirting around the bottom of West, enjoying the easy-to-get-to ground level classics. A West Mountain Day is a big day. A day where there is hard manual labor, skill and sometimes bravery required to get oneself to the climb of the day, so much in fact that it can become difficult to discern the effort spent climbing from the effort spent on the approach/descent, as one is just as demanding as the other. On days like this it’s best not to do the math. Never mind that you may have just spent more time hauling heavy pads up and over and through and under boulders than you did actually climbing boulders. Never mind that the full-body work over of soreness and exhaustion might not be from the climbing, but the getting to and from the climbs. Never mind that that wide leap over the gaping pit of death with a heavy pad and flip flops may have scared the shit out of you worse than today’s highball. It’s best to never mind all that. Because the mission is the climbing, and all the rest just minor details that never make the evening’s recap of the most amazing climbing day ever.

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We opted to stay home for Christmas this year versus the whirlwind tour of east coast friends and family that we typically do. This decision was quite a big deal, as we’ve been traveling east for the holidays for the last 19 (nineteen!!) years, with only 3 exception years. There are pros and cons to all that holiday traveling and also pros and cons to staying home. Fact is, neither option is perfect, which is fine. And traditions morph over time, which is also fine. As a good friend of our’s recently put it, trying to keep everything the same year after year is not only impracticable, but downright impossible given that the entropy of the universe is always increasing. With chaos and disorder growing with each passing day, how can one possibly expect anything in life to remain the same? Traditions included? Upon hearing this I immediately drew a correlation in my mind of the chaos and disorder that Paul and I thought we were in when Silas and Ivan were little babies, and how I sometimes long for what now appears to be those simpler times. Today’s chaos and disorder is SO much greater than in those days! Bottom line, there is just no holding the universe back people. And so, we had an absolutely lovely Tucson Christmas this year, complete with plenty of entropy but with the spirit of all our friends and family traditions still firmly intact.

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Merry Christmas!

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“Buffet Day” is a term we use to describe a day out at the boulders where one goes from boulder to boulder, sampling various climbs, sending only what one can do quickly. We’ve decided to be in sampling mode these first few trips to Hueco, trying out the new stuff, or stuff we’ve never been on. What I love about Buffet Days: there’s no “saving” oneself for the big proj. Just throw yourself at something and send now! And if the climb sucks, move on!

Today’s Buffet Day highlights:

Great day!

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Well, today was supposed to be a climbing day at Hueco. But thanks to a southwestern winter storm that decided to plant itself over El Paso for way longer than forecasted, we needed to find another adventure for the day. Sled riding anyone?

White Sands, New Mexico. Happy Winter Solstice!

posted by ARR