The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

It's spring break time and that means all the college students are out climbing! Elyse came to Utah for a week and a half of action packed climbing. The day she flew into town we took her to Rock Canyon for some evening climbing. The weather was perfect and the broken quartzite was sharp and positive. Over the weekend we headed to Joe's Valley for some sandstone bouldering. We had a decent sized group with us consisting of a new friend Collin, Chris, Peter, Elyse, Cassie, and I. Everyone warmed up on "Small One" before I took the crew down to the riverside boulders to escape the climbing crowd. We've never seen that many people at Joe's before. After conversing with some fellow climbers we found that it was due to the out-of-towners from Colorado and beyond. Regardless, we had a great day of climbing. Cassie came very close to sending a V6 and I sent my second V6 so we were quite happy with it.

The next day Elyse and I went to a piece of art on the great salt lake called the Spiral Jetty. It was cool, but as the water level was quite low there wasn't really any jetty at all. The water was about 100 yards out from the spiral. I also high-centered the honda civic and we had to get a pull out from a couple of nice guys with a decent sized SUV. It was epic since there was a snow storm coming and not really anybody else anywhere nearby for at least 20 miles. Oh well at least it made for good storytelling afterwards.

Cassie headed to the San Juan river for a 5-day float trip of catching disposing of unwanted sport fish which are causing problems for the native species who used to thrive in the rivers.

The following weekend we decided to make a camping trip of climbing at Triassic on Saturday and then heading to Little Wild Horse Canyon.

Climbing at Triassic was sweet. The weather was outstanding and some hard problems were sent. Most of the sending was by our uber-hard sending friend Andrew and not us, but we were certainly happy for him. It's very cool to climb with someone who inspires you to try harder, and Andrew certainly does that. His girlfriend Rachel (sp?) also came for the weekend. She's a hard climber as well and left with a tough V4 project that she is working. We had a beautiful day of climbing which ended on a boulder that has 3 problems on it, each with the same start, and a different finish. The Good a V4 has a pretty scary topout over a bad landing, The Bad a V5 has a crazy throw for a jug, and the Ugly is a very long V6 that has some stout moves with long reaches between holds. Andrew impressed everyone by flashing or onsighting all three problems. I contented myself with trying the V5 and came close to sending, but just didn't have the juice to finish. No worries though, we're heading back to Triassic this coming Sunday since the weather in Provo looks like it will be either Bad, or Ugly :)

Sunday we drove out to Little Wild Horse and were shocked at how windy it was. It was tough just keeping the car in the lane at some points due to crazy gusting the wind was. We ended up getting to the canyon a bit before noon and hiked into the canyon with my famous words of "I'm sure it won't be so windy in the canyon". Much to my disappointment the opposite was true. The soft sand in the canyon was being picked up by strong winds and thrown into our faces like a sandblaster. It was brutal. I didn't know sand could get into that many places on my body. Luckily the scenery made up for the conditions and we had a great time exploring the slot. It was strange to see that even the narrowest parts were actually dry this year. Two years ago (almost exactly) we did the same hike with Cassie's parents and there was water through a decent portion of the slot which required wading through ice cold water to continue the hike. This year there wasn't even a puddle, which was disappointing to Cassie and I. We kind of liked the extra work that the water forces on us. Instead of doing the loop hike we exited the same way we came, one reason was that mojo was with us and I didn't want to have to carry him up and down some of the boulder jams, another was that the wind was making the hiking unpleasant enough that everyone was pretty happy to just call it a day and plan to come back to hike Bell canyon another day when the weather would be more cooperative. On another note I was very happy with the pictures my Canon SLR camera took. It really performed well in the low light conditions and I ended up getting some nice shots. Feel free to check out our flickr page (as always) for lots more pictures that you see here.

Little Wild Horse Pictures
Joes Valley Pictures
Triassic Pictures