Well, I thought I'd try my hand at this blogging thing as it is supposed to be Matthew and Cassie and if you hadn't noticed, it's just been Matthew so far. Last week the NABS conference was in Salt Lake, which is where all the nerdy stream, river, bug, fish people like myself get together and talk about their work. You can tell how big of nerds we all are by how excited we all got at the NABS deck of cards everyone got which have a different picture of an aquatic invertebrate on each one. I'm looking forward to using them at our next poker night. It was great to see old friends and catch up with folks.



My friend Shannon stayed with us for the conference Rafael Swell. She hadn't been out there beforece and afterwards we went out to the San and as you can tell, it's one of our favorite places and there's tons to explore there. It was perfect time of year for flowers in the desert. We saw a few pictograph and petroglyph panels and went for a great hike. We had a couple cool lizard pose for us as well. The colorful one is an Eastern collard lizard and I think the other guy is a Western whiptail.


We were planning on hiking Devil's canyon and scrambling up San Rafael Knob, but we learned the Subaru doesn't qualify as a medium duty vehicle or the roads have gotten much worse since our guide book was published. I scraped bottom a couple times on the "light duty" section of the road then since it turned to "medium duty" we decided to walk to check out the road first and it was definitely not a trip the Suby would make. We found another hike we could do on the rim and then down through Coal wash which was pretty spectacular! It followed a OHV trail for a few miles along the rim we got a little lost on where we were supposed to drop into a side canyon, but after a bit of back tracking and guessing, we found a canyon to drop into which required a bit of scrambling around some big dry falls then out to the main wash scramble up to the rim then try to avoid stepping on all the cryptobiotic soil back to the car.

Today was the Utah Lake festival which is where we try to show people that Utah Lake really is a cool place; boating, fishing, birding, free food, face painting and fish hats. What more can you want? It's amazing the number of people who've lived here their whole lives and have never been out to a lake that is 5 minutes away from them and have no idea there is an endemic and endangered fish that lives there. For me it means taking Mojo out to a place where he can swim and stalk yellow headed blackbirds. He never tires of chasing them and watching him is always entertaining.

a little more snow

Yup, it snowed for a bit this morning at the cabin. Looking up at the hills it looks like some actually stuck. I bet Alta got a bunch.



This week we climbed twice in Rock Canyon (our local canyon). There are some really excellent quartzite climbs limestone climbs in the canyon. We opted for a wall called the AC/DC wall and the kitchen. Both of these areas were really great. The Kitchen has some 5.8-5.9 trad leads that can also be done on toprope. Since we were sans gear we just toproped some really fun crack climbs. I thought they were great, though Cassie was a bit less impressed. On Thursday we climbed at AC/DC wall and only had time for two climbs, so we climbed a 5.7 and a 5.9+ sport. Both of them were easy and fun. Plus the weather was outstanding and the views are beautiful. Gotta love having a local crag with this many climbs and yet so few people. Most states would be quite jealous of rock canyon, but having this much climbing on this many different kinds of rock is really amazing. Let me go over the list so you can appreciate whats around.



Rock Canyon: Quartzite and Limestone trad and sport. Hundreds of routes
American Fork Canyon: Mostly limestone with a little quartzite. A mecca of sport climbing probably with thousands of routes.
Little Cottonwood Canyon: Worldclass Granite Bouldering and trad multipitch climbs.
Big Cottonwood Canyon: Great Quartzite trad and sport climbing.
Maple Canyon: Cobblestone climbing. Probably some of the most unique climbing in the world.
Ibex: World renowned quartzite bouldering and great multipitch sport and trad climbs.
Joes Valley: world famous sandstone bouldering
Triassic: less well known but fantastic sandstone bouldering
St. George: sport limestone and sandstone
Indian Creek: world famous splitter cracks in the desert. People talk of this place in with awe in their voices.

So, that isn't all of the climbing, but it's a brief synopsis of some of the best. So, we're headed back to maple tomorrow to try some more climbs. Hope everyone out there is enjoying themselves.

maple canyon

Well it's been a bit quiet around here for the last week or so. The weekend of the 23rd we looked for a VW bus to take on the trip and had the check engine light looked at on the Honda. We found an awesome VW eurovan camper for the pricey tag of 18k, but man was it sweet. Totally decked out on the inside with great storage, water, two burner stove. This thing had it all and we're both pretty excited about getting one. We're not going to buy it anytime soon, but it does look like we could travel in style if we opted for it.

On sunday we went fishing with out friend Chris at Deer Creek. We all had a nice time fishing, but we just couldn't get anything to bite. The view of Mt Timpanogos was really nice. We're definitely better climbers that fishermen, and I think I was spoiled by the salmon in alaska. Salmon were always biting my lures, but here I think the fish get caught so much they are much more wary. And my lack of skill doesn't help either.

This sunday we headed to Maple Canyon to climb. It's such a nice area, and it's only an hour away. The climbing in Maple is probably some of the most unique in the world. It's cobblestone climbing and lots of it is vertical or slighty to extremely overhanging. Pump is the name of the game and Cassie and I found ourselves wrestling with a climb that she onsighted and I flashed a year ago. Apparently our endurance is not what it used to be thanks to all the bouldering. Oh well, there's always next weekend, and we are definitely headed back. We both are totally capable of redpoint (climbing without hanging or falling) climbing in the 11 range, we just haven't tried enough yet. I think with a little persistence we'll both climb one soon.

Hope everyone out there is enjoying summer. Take care. We'll probably take pictures of our excursions one of these times ;)