Moving On from England

Well, now that I’ve finally finished my spring break stories (and now that it’s September, I’ve been back in the U.S. for over two months, and I’m back at HLS for my final semester …) I’m finally ready to finish up this blog.

I graduated from Cambridge back in June:

And, prior to graduating, I had lots of end-of-term adventures that are well-document in photographs.

But, the good-or-bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that I really like having a blog to put all my stories up on – and so, I’m starting a new, more permanent, less-England-based one!  From now on, you will find me and my thoughts at nikathinks.blogspot.com.  Enjoy!

Spring Break Photos

And, now that I’ve finished my spring break stories, I’ve also put the photos up on Facebook.  Part 1, which I’ve linked before, is here, and Part 2, which is new, is now here.

Last Day of Spring Break

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

So this was the last day of our spring break road trip (and also the last trip I’ll blog about on my England blog!).  When we woke up in the morning, we had to begin by retrieving the car from outside the campground gates.  Then, we began completely unpacking the car so that when we packed it back up again, everything would fit for our drive back to England later in the day.

When we cleared out the side of the car that Neal was in charge of searching during the great wallet search, though, we came across a black wallet that wasn’t ours.  And was his.  So at least we had found it – although about 24 hours too late.  So I was in charge of phoning and texting Neal while Nick kept packing the car.

After we had everything packed up, we did some bouldering for just a few hours before we started the long drive back.  We climbed at J.A. Martin, doing problems on the Blue Circuit there.  We were pretty tired, so we (or at least I) still found them pretty hard.

My thighs were actually really sore, and I didn’t figure out why until I fell off a problem and they hurt.  Then I realized that they were tired from catching me falling off of lots of problems (especially La Marie Rose) the day before.  So it turns out that falling off is a really good thigh workout.

Eventually, we ate lunch at the boulder field, and then I made Nick drive me back to the campground we had stayed at during the first portion of the trip so that I could sneak in and wash my hands.

After that, we did the long drive back to England, which was pretty uneventful.  When we got close to Dunkerque, the city the ferry departed from, we managed to pick up radio from the Netherlands, which was exciting.  Even after we got back to England after the ferry ride, we were still getting French radio for a little while.

And then I was back in Cambridge for my final semester!

Boondoggling in France

Monday, April 20, 2009

Although it had been chilly outside overnight, when Nick, Neal, and I got up in the morning on Monday, it was already starting to warm up.  We had leftover croissants for breakfast and then geared up for a trip to the grocery store, which, despite being a hypermarket, was part of an even larger mall.  The mall also had a store called Decathlon that sold cheap outdoor stuff, which we we planned to go to to get Neal a temporary replacement tent/sleeping bag to use while he waited to get back the ones the airline had lost.

We got to the mall at about 8:45, but apparently all the big shops, including Carrefour and Decathlon, didn’t open until 9, so we milled around for a little bit.  Neal wanted to go get coffee, but thought he had accidentally left his wallet in the car, so Nick loaned him some money.  Meanwhile we watched people with shopping carts line up outside the Carrefour, getting ready to charge right at 9.

So, at 9, we joined the crowds and got our final food supplies for our last two days.  We then brought them out to the car before going to Decathlon so that Neal could do a full wallet search.  He figured it had fallen out of one of his pockets.  No luck, though.

After searching for a while we figured we would check back at the campsite and hope it was there, and meanwhile Mr. Moneybags Nick would be in charge of loaning money so that we could get things moving.  So we went to Decathlon, picked up some cheap gear, and headed back to the campground.  By this point things were actually getting pretty sunny and hot.

A thorough campground search, and a check with the campground office, revealed no wallet.  We also did a more thorough inspection around the seats of the car – nothing.  We knew that Neal had had the wallet as late last night as when we bought the pizza.  Neal was still psyched to climb though, so he figured that he would climb for a few hours and then go into Paris in the evening and deal with cancelling cards and stuff there.

So, we ate lunch and headed out to Bas Cuvier.  It was almost too hot, but it was still fun.  We tried mostly Red Circuit problems.  At one point, Neal tried to talk French to someone, but after a minute or two, the other guy said “let’s try English” – the other guy turned out to be from Colorado.  So that was funny.  Poor Neal.

One 6A that I had never been on before, that I was close on, was called Le Trou du Simon.  It had a terrifying topout that I worked out all the beta for but couldn’t bring myself to do.  Nick did it, using my beta.  After a while, we wandered over to La Marie Rose, which I wasn’t expecting to be difficult even though it was a 6A – I had done it multiple times in the past without too much trouble.  Nick re-flashed it (the way Daddy does), but I fell off on the first try, and next thing I knew there were about 5 or 6 other people who all came over to work it/slime it up.  And then I continued to fall off 5 or 6 more times, never successfully doing the hot and slimy topout (although I consistently did the normal crux move over and over).  So that was pretty frustrating.

At one point, Nick got on photo duty at least.

  

   

Neal tried it a few times, but he didn’t send either – he had already spent a little while flying off of L’Hélicoptère so was a little tired.

By this point, we were all getting kind of tired and ready to head into Paris.  Nick and I had vague plans to meet up with little sister Sage, who was studying there, and Neal had to get his wallet issues taken care of.  But first, we had to rescue Nick.  See, the issue is that the real crux of La Marie Rose is actually the descent.  When you get to the top of the boulder, you can either downclimb a 5A slab problem around the corner from La Marie Rose, which I suspect may actually be the easiest route but I’ve never actually tried because no one else thinks that’s the easiest way, or else you can take one of two normal descents involving another boulder.  The first of the two descents involves chimneying down an increasingly slick passageway between the La Marie Rose boulder and the one next to it.  I’ve done that once in the past, but it was desperate.  The second of these two normal descents involves making a flying leap from the La Marie Rose boulder to the one next to it that you would otherwise chimney against.  (Well, it’s not really a flying leap – it’s even scarier.  Rather than going foot first, you basically stick your hands out in front of you and lean forward so that you fall into a diagonal plank/pushup position against the other boulder – then you step your feet across to meet your hands.)  Even after your flying leap, you’re not home free – you still have a tricky downclimb from that boulder that I insist on a crashpad for.

The issue was that Nick had climbed up the 5A slab with his camera to take La Marie Rose photos.  When he got to the top of the boulder, he took off his shoes.  Eventually, he decided he wanted to take photos from the other boulder, and so did the flying leap with his camera (which looked precarious).  He had left his shoes behind.  And now he was stuck on top of the other boulder without his shoes (which would be necessary to do the downclimb) and unable to reverse the flying leap back to the La Marie Rose boulder.

I was tempted to leave him up there, but instead I had to go up the 5A slab to rescue the shoes, which I wasn’t too pleased about, because it meant that I would have to now do one of the descents.

So, eventually after much coaxing I did the fall-into-the-pushup position “flying leap” across the chimney and made it across to the other boulder and eventually did the downclimb from there, too, after Nick did it first (now with his shoes) and brought me a crashpad.

So, from there, we headed back to the campsite to drop off our climbing gear, pack up Neal’s stuff, and head to the Melun train station to take the train into Paris.  We also had to take all the stuff from our car, which was staying in the parking garage at the train station, and put it into the tent, because Nick was worried about theft.  Then we headed out.

It took a little while to get going at the parking garage because Neal was trying to negotiate with the credit card companies over the phone, but eventually we made it onto the train and headed into Paris.  Neal headed off to spend the night there and deal with all his problems, and we arranged for Nick to meet up with him in London after he got replacement cards and before he went back to America for him to pay Nick back (Neal was actually in London for a week or two visiting his sister, and this Fontainebleau trip was just a side trip).

After we got into Paris and said goodbye to Neal, the next step was finding Sage, who was about half an hour late, in the giant Gare de Lyon.  This involved multiple phone calls between my English cell phone and her French one that were costing us both a million dollars.  Eventually we were both insisting we were at track K, but neither of us could see each other.  Nick was about to have a heart attack based on the price of our phone usage, and said to me, “tell her to wave her hand in the air,” which I did – it turned out that she was actually on the platform, somehow, rather than at the obvious end of it, which Nick figured out.  So we found her.

For a little while, we walked around Paris and kept our eye out for good restaurants.  Sage told me about some French-Asian fusion restaurant that I wanted to go to, but it wasn’t on her map so we ended up at a different place.  Before we got there, though, we took some various photos.

At dinner, I was dying of thirst, so Sage was in charge of ordering lots and lots of water for our table.  That was good.  The restaurant had another potato pizza on the menu, which I was still in the mood for, but apparently they were out of some ingredient so I ended up getting chicken instead.  Tant pis.

At dinner, Nick realized that one issue we would have is that we would be getting back to the campground after 10pm, which was going to be a problem because the gates closed at 10.  We would be able to park the car just outside with no issues, but the tent was full with tons of stuff that would need to go in the car while we slept (we couldn’t just put it outside the tent; things got really dewy at night).  We would need to drag all this stuff across the field and out to the car, and possibly would need to lift it over the gate if there wasn’t a human-sized gate next to the car gate that was open.  The crux was going to be my large, 50+ lb suitcase (don’t forget that we were on a two-week trip involving a large variety of activities and climates) – lifting that over the car gate would be tough.

Oh well.  No matter what, we would be getting back to the campground after 10, so we spent a little bit more time looking around and taking pictures.  Nick was particularly interested in seeing the outside of the Louvre at night, so we headed over there for a little bit.

 

After that, we all got on the Metro and said goodbye to Sage.  Nick and I had an uneventful train ride back to Melun.

When we got to Melun just after midnight, though, the events started back up again.  The parking garage where we had left the car was totally locked up (with the car inside it), even though there were no signs anywhere indicating operating hours.  The campground, with all our stuff, was over ten miles away.  We looked around, and saw that the car entrance door would open – if you had a valid ticket from the garage already to stick in it.  (That would indicate that you had your car parked in there and were getting it out.)  But earlier in the night I had told Nick, “I’m going to leave the ticket in the car while we go into Paris” and Nick had said “that’s fine.”  So the ticket was locked up in the garage.  We waited to see if any of the few people still coming out of the train station were headed towards the garage so that we could tailgate in, but none of them seemed to.

So, we took a better look at the garage.  The “windows” (open parts of the concrete) on the first floor (“ground floor” if you’re European) were blocked by chain link fencing, so you couldn’t get in through them.  However, the windows on the upper floors weren’t, so if we could find a way to the upper windows we could hop in through those, walk down to the bottom floor where the car was parked, and drive out (clearly, that would work after-hours since the entrance door was set up to open after hours with a ticket).

While most of the upper floor windows were not at all accessible, it looked possible to climb up to a slight roof that was right above the car entrance and exit doors, which gave easy access to upper floor windows.  Nick was on duty, and did a good job hopping up there – he said it wasn’t too hard, but was a little scary with just the road underneath him because the hardest part was about 10-15 feet up.  As soon as he was established on the roof, it was easy – now he was at an upper level with no chain link blocking the windows, and just hopped right in, walked down them ramp, and opened up the car and got the ticket out.

At that point, even though it wasn’t necessary, he passed the ticket through the chain link out to me, and I was able to stick it into the slot that opened the car entrance door, so I went in and met him inside.  There were definitely no signs anywhere either (1) telling you to take your ticket with you or (2) indicating that the garage would close at any point, so that made us mad.

Anyway, at that point we were able to use our ticket from the inside to pay and open the exit gate to drive back to the outside, and back the the campground.  That whole adventure probably took an extra 45 minutes.

At the campground, even though the car gate was closed like we thought, there was at least an open human gate next to it, which was good news for getting all our gear back to the car – it meant that we could roll my giant suitcase through it rather than needing to lift it over the car gate.  So that was good.  I finally took a shower after that and we went to sleep for our last night in France; we had only one more half-day left there!

Fontainebleau, Again

Sunday, April 19, 2009

When we got up in the morning at the new campground in Fontainebleau, it had stopped raining (although things were still rather damp).  We managed to find a bakery that was still open to pick up breakfast at, and then Nick wandered around our campground and eventually found some of the OUMC people we had intended to meet up with – although not all of them.  Apparently some of the group were stuck in England (including one girl who was actually French) because French workers were striking and blockading the ports so ferries from England couldn’t get in.

So we hung out with them for a little while, but not very long – they actually had to leave that morning and were packing up their (quite buggy) campsite before Nick went over and distracted them.  We ate breakfast there, and Nick also cooked a giant pot of hot chocolate.  We had a surplus of yucky UHT milk and the only thing to do with it was to make hot chocolate out of it.  The milk had come from a party we had camped next to in Siurana that had a surplus of a bunch of supplies that they didn’t want anymore and gave to us (we also had a giant bag of potatoes, a lot of dishwashing soap, and 3-4 more rolls of toilet paper we picked up from them).

Eventually, Nick couldn’t distract the rest of them with hot chocolate any more, and they took off.  Things still weren’t very dry, so Nick went on a sudden let’s-clean-the-car rampage – the back was getting very messy.  So I mostly observed while he rounded up the escaped potatoes and got them all back into their bag.  He also took inventory of our toilet paper – that had sort of gotten out of control, too.  See, back when we were in Fontainebleau the first time around, the campground we were at didn’t provide you with toilet paper in the bathrooms, and we assumed this would be the case for the rest of the trip.  So, on the Saturday, knowing that Easter Sunday and Monday were coming up, we wanted to pick up a 6-pack of toilet paper.  But the store didn’t have 6-packs.  So we ended up with a 12-pack of toilet paper.  But then we stayed in a hotel Sunday night – and when we got to the Siurana campsite on the Monday night it turned out that one did have toilet paper.  Then we got another 4 rolls of toilet paper from the group camping next to us.  Our next stop was the hotel on the next Friday night, and then the Fontainebleau campsite we were at now – which also had toilet paper.  So now we had a collection of about 16 rolls of toilet paper rolling around in the back of the car, which Nick was sorting out.  He also dedicated a “bags’ bag” for the empty bags floating around.  I mostly observed this and ate more of the gummy worms I had got in Andorra.

Finally, we decided that things had dried up enough to make an attempt to go climbing, and headed over to Apremont, where Nick wanted to try his project.  Some of the holds turned out to be wet, but we still had fun on some of the problems around it, and took some photos.

 

 

After that, it was our lunch time.  Meanwhile, we had made plans to meet up with Neal-from-HMC sometime in the afternoon, which was complicated since none of us had cellphones that were particularly reliable in France.  We were using his sister, based in England, as a liason.  However, we somehow did manage to meet up with him at the Melun train station after lunch.  Neal was a little stressed out, because one of his bags was lost on his flight from New York to London, and was now tent-less, but he was still up for heading to the boulders.

Meanwhile, things had started to dry, and by the time we had Neal, the sun had come way out.  The three of us then headed over to Cul de Chien for some late afternoon bouldering.  I did a couple 5Cs, but nothing harder than that; Nick and Neal both did similarly.

Eventually, we tired Nick out, and Neal was trying to save his fingers for future projects, so we headed into town, intending to pick up a pizza to take back to the campsite for dinner.

Well, that turned into an epic – the pizza shop, which Nick had ordered from in the past, was very slow.  After interpreting the menu (kind of), we picked a pizza with potatoes for a topping – I love those!  But one of the other toppings on the pizza we didn’t want, so we ordered it without those.  Then we waited … for a long time.  Eventually, after checking in several times, it turned out that the pizza lady had accidentally made a pizza with the topping we didn’t want.  We’d already been waiting like 45 minutes by this point, and would have happily taken it anyway – but she said she’d already thrown it out and was making a new one.  Ugh.  I think she was sensing a mutiny and gave us a free bottle of Coke – but I don’t even like Coke.  It pleased Nick and Neal, though.

Eventually we got back to the campground and ate our pizza – finally.  After that, we headed to bed, which was a bit tricky.  Nick’s tent only fits two people (barely), so Neal was stuck sleeping in the back of Nick’s car, which is a station wagon (or, in British, an “estate”).  Luckily, after Nick’s cleaning rampage, the back was a little cleaner, so we were able to arrange stuff so that Neal had a flat area to sleep.  It was probably still rather chilly for him though.

So, those were our adventures on our next-to-last full day of our spring break road trip.

Siuirana Climbing

At the moment I'm cranky because no one is driving to Mile End tomorrow, so I probably won't be able to go, but this post is about...

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Today when we got up it was finally clear, and the rain had stopped, although there were intermittent clouds. Nick and I ate breakfast relatively quickly and headed back to Grau dels Masets. We were disappointed to see that a climb we had identified two days ago as looking good, but hadn't yet done, was absolutely dripping. It was a 6b that shared anchors with a 7 (easy 5.12 range) that we wanted to toprope -- but both were sopping, so that was a no go.

We warmed up on some other stuff at the eastern part of Grau dels Masets, and did a pretty tricky 6b (one of the ones that Nick didn't quite onsight despite being pretty close, and then I flashed by using his beta and prehung draws -- strop strop). Then we heaed over to the western part of the crag to do some of the longer, more exposed stuff. The hand-drawn topo in the guidebook was confusing at first when we thought we found the world's softest 6b (turned out to be 5+), but then we figured it out and did a whole bunch of 6s there, almost all lead, pretty much all in the 5.10 range.

We ate lunch at one point while we waited for a route to free up. Both us and another party wanted to both do two routes that shared the same set of anchors. We wanted to lead one and TR the other; the other party wanted to lead both. So we were stepping on each other's heads and crossing ropes and all that stuff. So at one point they were doing something while we ate lunch and watched it get progressively cloudier.

However, it hadn't totally started raining or anything, so once we got the chance we attempted to TR the 6c+ that came down from the anchors we had already clipped. We knew that the start was going to be hard based on the other party, but Nick and I simply never figured it out, and the other party was gone by this point. Eventually we both pulled past it and both cleanly TRd the rest of the climb, which was in the 6c/6c+ range. The bouldery start to me felt way harder, since neither Nick nor I could find any way of doing it that was even close. I would have lead the rest if I had figured out a way to do the start, since the rest was totally my style. I kind of suspected that something had broken at the start at some point, though.

There were a few drops of rain after that, but it eventually passed and became sunny again, and Nick and I did a few more easy 6s before heading back to the campground. That night, we ate dinner at the campsite restaurant again (we were pretty much out of food, and there were also a few more sporadic rain showers at this point) and headed to bed early again. This was our most productive sport climbing day of the trip, and was generally really pretty good -- it was too bad we didn't have more days like this! We didn't take any pictures this day, though.

Rome Revisited

Over the weekend, Nick and I saw the new Angels & Demons movie, which was fun because it was shot all over Rome and Nick and I kept seeing all the places we had been to when we visited back in December. Besides just St. Peter's Square and St. Peter's Basilica, we saw the Sistine Chapel (presumably they used a set piece for that), the Pantheon, Castel Sant'Angelo, Piazza del Popolo, Piazza Navona and the Fountain of the Four Rivers, and a lot of aerial shots of Rome and Vatican City. Fun!

Not-So-Sunny Siurana

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Overnight, we start to hear really strong winds around 2am. Really strong. I'm convinced the tent is going to blow away with us in it, and keep telling Nick. Nick keeps telling me to go back to sleep. Eventually I do -- but then the rains start. And it is pouring for what seems like hours. Nick still keeps telling me to go back to sleep. Eventually the rain dies down too.

But in the morning when we get up, everything is still quite damp (including Nick's pillow, which is really mine, because we were using both of mine for this trip). However, the sun is starting to make an appearance, and we decide that we'll wait a few hours for things to dry out.

Meanwhile, the "azure sky" group above us is packing up, and is trying to offload some of the random stuff they've acquired, so we take it. We get a lot of milk (which I'm really excited about until I see that it's UHT), a large thing of dishwashing soap, a huge bag of potatoes, onions (which I tell Nick not to put near any other food so the other food doesn't smell oniony), three or four unstarted rolls of toilet paper, and a few other random things.

At this point, our toilet paper roll count is quite high -- around 15 or 16. Here's how that happened: we had initially bought a 4-pack, because the bathrooms in the Fontainebleau campsite don't have their own toilet paper, and then decided to supplement with a 6-pack from Carrefour that we got on Saturday so that we would have enough to carry us through for a while. Except that Carrefour didn't have 6-packs -- so instead we got a 12-pack. But then there was toilet paper at the hotel in Andorra, and toilet paper in the Siurana campsite bathrooms (which had to be thrown in trash cans rather than flushed because the septic system couldn't handle it). So our toilet paper stock just kept increasing with the additional supplies from the Brits.

So after breakfast (muffins and bread from the campground's café/restaurant -- we didn't have much food left and it was way more convenient to get things from there then to drive for an hour on windy roads to get to a food store), things were still looking damp and we decided that we would walk into the tiny village of Siurana proper, which we hadn't been to yet (the campground is about half a mile from the village itself). There, we could see if there were any viable food stores (there weren't, really, other than restaurants) and just take a look at the little mountain village. And hopefully the rock would dry in the meantime.

We could just see the refugio on a clifftop on the walk into town, and we could also see some of the crags we had driven by on the way in, as well as the wiggly road we came in on (no wonder I felt carsick!).







The town center was old, and was also entirely pedestrianized -- had we stayed at the nice hotel there, we would have had to carry all our luggage in by about half a mile (we saw some people walking out with luggage).







We walked over to the mountaintop that had a church and a monument on it.











Finally, we walked over to the cliffs that were near this part of town. The good news was that they were pretty much dry (they'd had direct sun on them for a few hours at this point), but the bad news was that there was another impending rain cloud in the distance.



Nevertheless, we decided to head back to the campground, hope the rain would hold off, and attempt to go climbing. So we headed back, taking another picture of the wiggle-road along the way.







So then we decided to attempt to head back to the area we were at yesterday, despite intermittent sprinkles and a few thunder growls. We were hungry for lunch, and decided we would take it with us. So this time we used the car to drive to the parking for the crag, and decided to eat lunch before doing the 15-minute hike to the crag from the parking while the weather decided whether or not to really rain.

Well, right when we were finishing lunch, it did start to really rain. And rain and rain and rain.

We headed back to the campground's restaurant, and spent the whole afternoon there waiting for a break in the rain. It came in and out, but it never stopped long enough for there to be any sort of dry rock available. Nick and I played about a gazillion games of tens and gin rummy, and I composed some blog posts on the netbook. We also discovered that there was a room with two ancient PCs that in theory did usually have internet access that you could use for like a euro/30 mins or something (in theory; in practice they didn't enforce paying), but even those didn't have internet at the moment because the campground had shut off access during the thunderstorms to keep everything from getting fried. There was a movie screen that people were watching climbing movies on, and the Brits at the table next to us were watching a UK film, and one of them seemed to have a personal grudge against one of the climbers in the movie, so it was fun to listen to his rants for a while.

Eventually Nick couldn't take any more card games, but it was clear there wasn't going to be any more dry rock today. I took a shower and then we ate dinner in that same restaurant (which was actually really good). So those were our adventures. We were pretty cranky after the whole long, long afternoon -- but at least it seemed like it had finally rained itself out by nightfall.

I told you that mackeral sky wouldn't be good.

Sunny Siurana

Back in time to...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

When we woke up in the morning in our campsite in Siurana, the first thing we here is one of the psyched Brits in the campsite next to ours saying "Azure sky! Not a cloud in sight! AZURE sky!". So Nick and I poke our heads out of the tent and see that, as usual, the Brits don't understand exactly what clouds are (I have seen a lot of forecasts in England that are "partly cloudy" with "100% cloud cover" -- what's "partly" about that?). The sky in Siurana isn't so much azure sky as it is mackerel sky. So I tell Nick that rain is coming in a day or two.

But today really is still quite sunny, despite the high clouds. So we start by going into the campsite's café/restaurant/reception and taking a look at the campground's guidebook with all the new routes in it, and copy a few of them down that are applicable to the areas we are going to today. So then we pack up and head to our first choice of crag near where we climbed yesterday. But when we get there, it's pretty intimidating -- it's on the side of a gorge and feels pretty exposed, and a lot of the 6s have pretty high first bolts with not-so-easy starts below them. Nick is feeling particularly unpsyched about this. So we took some photos but then decide that maybe we should see whether the other crag we had picked out as a good starting crag would be a better choice.

So we head over to Grau dels Masets, camì and oest. It takes us a little while to find the walk-in, which is down a dirt road for a bit before a not-entirely-obvious turnoff (we kept trying to turn off too soon), but eventually find the trail and make it down. Once we get there, we know that this crag is more our speed. There are toddlers, doggies, and Brits -- total gumby crag. Perfect. The bolts are closer together, the first bolts are lower, there is lots more shade, and the terrain isn't so steep that you think that if someone blows it before they get to the first bolt you'll both go tumbling to the bottom of the gorge. But there are still pretty views across the gorge.





We did an easy 6 at the eastern half of the crag to warm up and then, due to the gumby factor, moved over to Grau dels Masets (oest) so we could have a bit more space. We did a few good 6s over there, including one that I really liked called Rocky. Everything was in the 5.10 range, but pretty well spread out between .10a and .10d. I flashed everything (pinkpoint!); Nick almost onsighted everything but hung once or twice while grumbling about hanging draws and not having beta. Everything was long, but nothing was too much of a challenge for our 60m rope.



Then, we headed back to the eastern half and did one more 5+ there, but at this point it was actually already quite late in the day (crag-finding and new-route-copying took a lot of time), so then headed back out.





We get back to the campsite and cook dinner (well, Nick cooks while I shower). The weather is still sunny, but I hadn't liked the looks of some of the high clouds during the day. Nick, though, proved by induction that the weather would stay good tomorrow (it was good yesterday, and it was good today).

While we're cooking dinner, it starts to get significantly colder now that the sun is sinking, but it's still not bad.



We look at the guidebook some more to make plans for tomorrow, generally get organized, and head into the tent to play some more cards and go to bed.