Once we got to the parking lot, though, we realized that even though it was sunny, it was going to be cold because of the wind. We were at the Burbage South boulders, which I have been to before on several occasions, particularly because they're quick to dry. Except that the reason they're so quick to dry is because of the wind. So we hung around the parking lot for a while sorting stuff out, and then trudged through the snow to the boulders.
I had a starving attack during the walk-in, though (by this point it was like 11), so I had to have a little lunch at the boulders before I did anything else.
After this, we finally started to investigate the bouldering. The problem was, we needed to find boulder problems that weren't in the shade, weren't covered in snow, and weren't wet. It seemed like the wind had covered quite a bit of the low stuff with snow, which meant that sit-starts weren't really going to happen on a lot of the stuff. Meanwhile, because the upper faces of the boulders are so low-angle, they often ended up with snow stuck on top of them -- especially when it came time to top out. So Nick found a 6a he wanted to try (it looked okay but not great) -- but it was in the shade. He tried it anyways, barely got off the ground (hopped a few times), and then decided he was the coldest he had ever been in his life because he did a shade problem. After seeing that performance I opted not to try it myself.
From there, Nick and I continued on to the one boulder that seemed to have a sunny, non-snow-covered face. There were a couple V0s on it I ran up quickly. Nick was still too cold to climb them.
At this point, Nick and I decided that our best option would be to go for a short afternoon hike instead. We drove about twenty minutes to a nearby area that Nick really likes for hiking, and that has a lot of mountain biking that he has done as well.
We also saw a section of exposed rock where there was apparently a big landslide a while back in England that wiped out a whole section of a major road.
We also took some photos to turn into a panorama because I had heard that Windows Live Photo Gallery had a good photo-stitching tool. That turned out to be true! Click on it to enlarge.
We continued on, starting downhill-ish (we were doing a loop). We saw some green bins near the side of a road we walked by that Nick said were used to store the "grit" used for the roads during the snowstorms. I totally thought we should steal them, and sell them back at high prices, because apparently England has run out of grit to use on its roads due to all the snow in the last week. But they were big. Instead I took some photos to make a second panorama (didn't crop this one).
From there, we continued on down, and eventually got to the car around 4. Then, though, we had an oopsie that ended in an ouchie. See, what happened was, Nick was going to change his shoes, and for some reason decided to sit in the passenger's seat and not the driver's seat to do it. The rear door on the passenger's side was open, too. I told Nick not to sit on my iPod that was on my seat. He used his left hand to straighten himself out just as I was shutting the rear door on the passenger's side. Except that the door didn't shut. Because his finger was in it.
So OUCH. His finger immediately started gushing blood, but the good news was that it was still attached and not broken or really damaged (other than a big chunk of skin missing) at all. The only thing really to do was to put a bandaid ("plaster") on it. And we actually did have bandaids. So it kept hurting a lot, but didn't really do much other than gush blood (and it didn't even gush the bandaid off, so it couldn't have been that much blood). The fingernail is still attached, but the chunk of skin missing is right below the fingernail, so I guess it's possible the fingernail will fall off. But it still looked pretty attached to me.
Other than our incident, though, we actually had a very good day and a lot of fun on our hike. It was kind of an adventure and we got nice views. I was a good temperature for most of the hike except right at the top, because it got really windy there again. So at that point we headed out for the 2.5 hour drive to the hut in North Wales with me feeling guilty about Nick's finger.
The hut itself was fun. CUMC and OUMC were there, ultimately in about equal numbers. Nick and I found places to squeeze in to sleep, and I took a shower while dumping a lot of water on the floor -- the showerheads actually aim entirely outside of the shower stalls and onto the floor, making things challenging. Other than that, the shower was quite good.
For dinner, Steve-from-OUMC was cooking a big chili-type thing for 20 people, and Nick and I made numbers 19 and 20. Apparently Steve was finding the cooking challenging because there were limited burners on the stove and a lot of Cambridge had each brought their own individual meals rather than doing joint cooking, meaning that they were all fighting for burners. Steve said he lit a burner (which was apparently a struggle to light), turned around, picked up a pot, turned back around to put it on the burner, and found that it was already occupied by someone's frying pan and bacon. But he eventually managed to cook for us, which was good.
After dinner, they started all their hut games, with Steve running the show and Rob-from-OUMC and Sesh-from-OUMC doing sidekick duties. Because most of the games were OUMC-created (Steve-created?), OUMC was winning most of them. However, apparently sock-wrestling (hang in harnesses attached to overhead beams by slings and try to get the other person's socks off before they get yours off) was imported to OUMC from CUMC, so they were much more successful at the sock-wrestling.
I eventually went to bed at like 2:30am. Nick had a goal to be up later than all the Cambridge kids, but apparently met his match in Fred-from-CUMC. So they continued with their mutually assured destruction until 3:30, apparently, when they both jointly gave up and went to bed. We were up at about 7:45 the next morning, and packed up rather quickly. Nick and I left the hut as it was starting to clear out around 9:30 -- OUMC was taking charge of making sure it was clean, and had decided it would be easiest just to get people out of the hut and gone so that they could clean rather than trying to get these people to help clean themselves. So that was fine with Nick and I.
We drove to Llanberis to try to do some bouldering, but just as we drove past the turnoff for Pete's Eats, which Nick pointed out to me, it started to half-rain, half-snow. Great. The boulders there weren't particularly sheltered, either. We drove up the pass and back down again, debating what to do. I took a picture of Cenotaph Corner, the obvious corner in this cliff:
Eventually we decided that, because there is often better weather on the coast, we would drive over to some bouldering there and make an attempt at that. The drive took about an hour, and about halfway along it did start to clear up and the sun started to sort of shine through some of the clouds. Unfortunately, that was the best we got. By the time we had actually arrived at Porth Ysgo, it was precipitating again.
We eventually psyched ourself up to do the (very muddy) approach to the boulders. It should have taken like 10 minutes, but in the rain and the muck it took about half an hour. It was challenging to get down to the boulders themselves, which were on a beach right near the sea, since we were walking on grass well above it and had to sort of scramble down a slopey, muddy, 30-degree angle grassy hill to get down to the boulders themselves. And they were soaked. Both from rain and from sea spray. And, because it is a rocky beach, they all have death-landings from all the giant rolly rocks all over the place underneath them. So that was a total no-go.
On the walk back to the car, we saw a little hole near the side of the path, and we couldn't figure out what it was. It kind of looked manmade. It was a little cave that turned into a tunnel that went far back into a section of rock. Nick and I didn't go down it (we could have fit scrunched down), but we shined our headlamps in and had a good look around. Interesting! It may have been related to some old, very abandoned stone structure we saw closer to the beach that had a giant winch in it. Very curious. Meanwhile I had gotten stroppy by this point because my white snowpants had gotten covered in mud and sheep poop up to the knees. So we continued back to the car and had a snack there.
We were in a completely abandoned area so Nick decided to let me drive the car again. Basically all I had to do was pull out, go like 10 feet downhill to another intersection (completely abandoned road, not a single car went past it), turn left, and then try to go uphill as far as I could. When I got to the left-hand turn, though, I turned way too sharply (steering wheel on the wrong side) and sort of drove the left-hand side of his car into a ditch a little. But it was fine, I just kept going. Then it came time to shift into second, though, and that's where the problems started. The car jumped a little bit and then stalled. Now I was facing uphill and had to start the car. I tried, and it almost worked. The car jumped forward like three times and really wanted to go ... but then stalled again. At this point, Nick took over the driving.
We sort of gave up at this point, since it was precipitating with rain everywhere and we didn't want to hike or boulder. So we started the drive back to Cambridge. The GPS sent us a weird way that completely bypassed the town of Betwys-y-Coed, where we were thinking of getting a pub lunch. Instead we had to do a narrow mountain road through an increasing blizzard (apparently, GPS doesn't do elevation contours and can't tell the difference between a mountain road and a pass through a notch). In the next town, we found a pub though and got a late (3pm-ish) lunch there instead.
From there, we had about three and a half hours left to drive to get to Cambridge, according to the GPS. About two hours into that drive, though, we started hitting heavy snow, and the highway didn't seem to be too gritted (I knew we should have taken that salt from the Peak District!). Plus it was after dark by this point. So the driving slowed down a lot for that. Eventually we passed the snowstorm and the driving speeded up again, but the slow-down had added an extra half-hour onto our drive.
We eventually made it back to Cambridge and ate dinner at my house while I put my snowpants in the washing machine. Apparently, though, Darwin closes early on Sunday nights, and I couldn't get back to the washing machines where my pants were to put them in the dryer. So they had to sit in a wet ball overnight. This morning, though, I retrieved them and put them in the dryer and they actually came out just fine. So that was good.
After dinner, Nick had to make another hour-and-a-half drive back to Orpington, but he was home by about 11:30, so that was good. So those were our weekend adventure/boondoggles.
4 comments:
I'm disappointed that you didn't put a picture of Nick's finger on your blog.
Haha, I would have if I had one! Maybe I'll do an update in a week or something with pictures.
We had somewhat similar antics up at the Harvard cabin ice climbing this weekend. There was almost a dinner crisis when we couldn't get the well to shoot out water - but eventually we did. The students who had to cook supper did a good job though - made enough for 40 - but it took while. Fortunately I had beer and could wait while listening to Al Stebbins tell me (for the 10th time) of how he led Cenotaph corner (took several tries because he kept gettting rained off) and the epic he had trying to get coffee at Pete's Eats. can't wait to get there.
Alright, you better plan to come to England this summer then. Nick keeps commenting on how Cenotaph Corner is a drainage shoot so if there's any rain at all it's always dripping.
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