escaping the cold (almost)

Inside the TeePee Boulder

This weekend we made a trip down to Moe's Valley in St. George Utah. We went there a few times earlier this year so you might remember it from previous blogposts. We decided to make the journey after cold weather kept threatening to keep us from going outside to climb. We left Friday morning and were climbing by early afternoon. The weather was warm indeed and the sun on our faces kept spirits high.

Saturday morning the real work began as we headed into the main bouldering area armed with our newly purchased guidebook created by two local climbers. Many more climbs were documented and we were excited to see how much we could do. Unfortunately the weather quickly went from sunny to total cloud cover and the temps became quite cold. In my opinion that's the best climbing weather, but Cassie's big toe which was staying a constant white begged to differ. I guess climbing with numb toes is kind of difficult.

We quickly set about dispatching some warmups and then headed straight to a really cool roof climb called Underwhelmed. Unfortunately I was being totally lame about taking video or pictures and we don't have any shots of that climb. We will be going back next weekend however so I expect to get some shots for the next blogpost. Cassie came very close to sending that problem and is excited to go back and give it another try.

Cassie getting warmed up and loving the sun.

We  then headed to a cave called the Device Ignitor which has 3 quality lines coming out of it. I tried the left variation and sent just as my strength was leaving me. Cassie tried the middle line and found that she was completely exhausted from trying Underwhelmed so many times. Again my apologies for not having any shots of those climbs. I do have some video though and plan to put together some clips after next weekend. We left after 7 hours of near constant climbing. We could have been a geriatric couple if you just listened to all the moaning and complaining about how sore we were. Cassie's back was in pain from an apparent nerve pinch (totally unrelated to climbing). Her abs were sore from climbing basically horizontal (upside down) for most of the day and her fingers were compltely raw from the rock. I was in similiar shape with forearms that could barely squeeze a tube of toothpaste and some missing skin from the sharp rock. Cassie was in bed and asleep by 8:30 and slept till well after 8am.

We woke up and made french toast and lattes then headed back out to see how much we had recovered during the night. The answer was: not much. We tried a few problems and spent most of the time on the ground groaning about different aches and pains. We decided to head up to a boulder called the Spiders Drum which has some really cool flakes that make deep drumlike sounds when pounded on. Now something you have to understand about rock quality is that pounding on rock and listening for a drumlike sound is a good way to find out the solidness of the formation. Any drumlike sound is a definite bad sign. But we climbed anyway with some misgivings about the quality of the stone because the climb looked SO COOL. Definitely one of the best V3s I've ever tried.

Spider's Drum

The holds on Spiders Drum.

After that we went to a climb called Israil (lots of rock climbing route names are play on words). It's a very stout problem but Cassie and I made good progress on it. We were completely wiped by the time we got close to sending and had to leave to come back to SLC. Hopefully we'll get video and pictures of us sending it next weekend.

So, now back to our dayjobs which we are very excited won't be there for much longer. Sorry about the lengthy post, we just don't have very many pictures so I figured I would fill in the details with words.