A Tale of Two Expeditions, and my packing list.

 It's hard to convey what makes these adventures worth the time and effort.  To visit these places requires a Wind River Reservation fishing permit, a long windy drive up a potholed road, and a full day's effort with or without pack horses to get in, and another full day of hiking to get out.  Jesse made the trip from Seattle.  I drove up from Grand Junction, and we both did it twice.  We did it because it is worth it.  The exploratory aspect, the romance of heading into the mountains for days to see what you will find, the slightly hallucinatory effect that this much wilderness, nature, scale and solitude can have on you. The fun bouldering feels like an incredible bonus.  If you're interested in seeing my packing list for an expedition like this, I put it at the end of this post.

Cathedral Lake, Wyoming 2021

The trip was Jesse Brown's idea.  He wanted to do a horse packing bouldering trip into the Winds.  It wasn't a completely original idea.  Todd Skinner and crew bouldered around Mt. Hooker from a horse pack supported camp when they weren't busy climbing the big wall, and I'd paid a deposit for horse packing back in 2010 for a trip to the Cirque of the Boulders before the other developers backed out.  But this was the first horse packing trip with bouldering as its main pursuit, that actually happened, that I was aware of.

Jesse Brown psyched to hike in without a big pack!

Cathedral Lake was just below some incredible looking boulder fields on Google Earth, horse packers go there regularly, and it has established camping areas with a bear box.  The more the merrier with alpine bouldering, and having more people helps distribute the cost of the horses and wranglers.  

  

Regular Organic Pads fit on the horses well.

Jesse and I invited friends.  Josephine made the trip to see the Winds.  Andy made the trip to climb, but also to get photos.  Nick wanted first ascents.  I was excited to see new boulders and hopefully put up something cool.

Collin came in exited for all of it.

We hiked in, it started to rain.  We searched for blocks in the rain.  Boulders were plentiful, but not the quality we hoped for.  It was cold too.  We hung out by the fire when it wasn't actively raining, and sat in our tents when it was.

The next day started wet, but things dried out in the afternoon.  Nick went exploring early and found blocks to develop by himself at the base of Cathedral.  The rest of the crew got started on a nice set of blocks in a saddle just north of Cathedral that we called the "Badger Boulders." We actually saw a badger in them when we arrived.  We put up 7 problems, and I made this topo for them.

This was my favorite.

Then we hiked up valley, finding even better boulders and views!

We couldn't stop exploring, but I did take time to put up one line in this valley.  A V2 called "The Outlier."

Josephine was feeling wiped out by the hiking and altitude.  So she waited for us down valley while we explored.  We found her asleep on a rock when we returned.  I guess she wasn't that scared of the bears.

The next day was rainy.  So Nick, Andy, and Collin hiked out early.  They'd planned on 3 days of bouldering, but because of the weather only got one good afternoon.  

The next day was dry and Jesse, Josephine and I went back to the coolest block we saw up valley.  I put up this line, the highlight of my trip, and Jesse put up an exciting V3 up the left arete called "The Mountains are Calling"

The horses allowed us to pack in incredible food, which was nice, but expensive.  We paid $500-600 per person after tip.  Is it worth it?  It depends on how much you need to suffer to get $600 I guess.  My big pad wouldn't fit on the horses, so I still needed to carry a lot of weight myself.

Jesse went out for a hike on his own at the end of our Cathedral Lake trip.  That's when he discovered an amazing zone that became the focus of our next summer trip.

The Hemingways 2022 

Another horse pack supported trip organized by Jesse.  This time to a valley south of Cathedral Lake.  He invited his friend Greg, who brought his family for a bit of fishing and bouldering.

I decided to carry all my own gear and food in myself.  I wanted to see what I could do, and avoid the high  cost of horses.  My pack was heavy, but when I saw the valley and the boulders, the burden was worth it.

One key to making the expedition work, was my ultralight tent. I set up the tent, and then Jesse and I hiked our pads into the boulder field.

We hung the pads for the night.  No one else was in the entire valley, and they were safe from critters.

The next morning we hiked in, just carrying our day packs.

At first we were disappointed by the unexpectedly high amount of snow.  Many of the featured overhangs Jesse photographed on his hike the year before were buried.  We made the best of our situation, climbing some lines that might only be possible over snow landings.

The next day was a rest day.  I bathed in water warmed by the sun running over rock slabs.  Amazing!

The next climbing day I put up my favorite line of the trip.  It starts where it does because it's where I could reach the horizontal crack.  Traversing right, just to then traverse back left seemed silly, so I didn't.

Jesse put up a classic!

And I added one more interesting line.

Greg was surprised how good the boulders were.  He his ditched fishing to spend an afternoon developing this nice block with his daughter.  They did four good lines up this block V2-V4.

Jesse climbing "Dirty Sally" V2

I was surprised at how well my expedition bouldering system worked for a five day trip.  I've used it many times since.  Everything I needed, nothing I didn't.

In a plastic bear canister I put five days of food.  For me that's ten packets of instant oatmeal for breakfast, ten Starbucks Via instant coffee packets.  One package of hard cheese, one bag of crackers, 16 oz of beef jerky, peanut M&Ms, 8 cliff bars, and 5 freeze dried back packing dinners.

Two Nalgene water bottles, iodine tablets for water treatment.  

Day pack with climbing shoes, chalk, athletic tape, brushes

Puffy coat, hoody, one pair of pants, one pair of shorts, 2 t-shirts, 4 pairs of socks and underwear.  Camp Suds to do laundry and for bathing in a stream, toothbrush and paste, wag bags

Headlamp, Compass, Map, Rain Coat, Pocket Knife, Pen, Small Journal, Phone, Extra Battery and charging cord, Insect Repellent, head net, hat, sunscreen, backpacking stove, and one fuel canister, lighter, emergency matches.

Hiking Poles (required for the tent)

Gossamer Gear Tent called The One.

Inflatable sleeping pad

Ultralight plastic ground cloth

Down Sleeping Bag

Approach shoes

A couple cams and slings for hanging your pad.

Stuff everything into an Organic Backfourty Big Pad, and start hiking.

That's all you need for a five day bouldering expedition into the Winds.  

Thanks go out to Jesse and everyone who came along for making these trips happen!

Rocklands, South Africa 2021

 

I haven't been keeping up on this blog.  Have any climbers kept up with their blogs?  People are primarily still on Instagram, despite it being an inferior platform with inferior content.  Quantity over quality, delivered with no effort at all, just spilling out at us, like soft serve ice cream.  Anyway, I'll be blogging regularly again (in addition to posting on Instagram) and there's a lot to catch up on!  Starting with my trip to Rocklands, South Africa in 2021.

At this point I'd been divorced for a year.  My non-romantic adventure buddy, Josephine, had invited me on a trip to the Seychelles.  There were some big rocks to explore on the Seychelles, but it was a long way to fly for granite that could be amazing, but might not be.  I decided to make sure I'd get some amazing bouldering by adding a stop in Rocklands to my travel plans.  Then Covid restrictions made the trip to Seychelles from South Africa impossible.  So my Rocklands trip was extended to three weeks.

I'd wanted to visit Rocklands ever since Chuck Fryberger's film Specimen came out in 2006.  I had summers off, but I also had a wife, two daughters, two dogs and a job caretaking for a Quaker meetinghouse on the weekends.  So I couldn't figure out how to make it happen.  Fast forward to the summer of 2021. I could easily leave for three weeks, by myself, for just the price of one plane ticket.  I hadn't wanted or expected to be single, but I was, so I decided to make the best of it.

I wasn't worried about Covid, because I was fully vaccinated.  The idea of flying half way around the planet did bother me.  I know that climate change is real, and I don't want to contribute to it.  But as I flew over New York City at night, with it's miles and miles of millions of lights, and with cars streaming along arterial highways like red blood cells, it hit me hard that I couldn't do anything to stop climate change.  Even if the plane I was on crashed so everyone on it stopped contributing to climate change, that wouldn't slow down climate change by any measurable amount.   Seven billion people would just keep emitting carbon.  New technology or cataclysmic events are the only things that could help the planet stay stable at this point.  My flight to South Africa no longer felt significant as I saw the scale of human endeavor spread out before me.   The mountains make us feel insignificant in comparison to the nature world, but cities can show us even more clearly how small we really are.

Then I arrived at the Newark Airport and had to spend the next 48 hours there.  One missed flight due to an earlier flight delay to Denver.  And then a cancelled flight from Newark because the airport kept us on the runway too long so the pilots timed out.  The lines were so long, sometimes there was no one at the service desk.  I found out that United Airlines gives rich people a special hotline so they don't need to deal with this bullshit.  It made me upset about the world.

The line at 2 AM after a cancelled flight in the Newark airport.

I had to spend a full night trying to sleep in an airport intentionally designed to keep anyone from lying down.

I was so worked.  I recommend avoiding the Newark Airport.

After 3 days of travel I landed in Cape Town and the world was bright again.  I rented a car, got to my place in a de Pakhuys guest house, and accidentally slept in until the late afternoon.

I expected a wild Rocklands landscape like the opening shot of this post.  What I woke up to was a bouldering resort.

I set my cheap rental pad under the first good boulder I saw.  It's called Poison Dwarf.  You can rent cheap pads, or if you get to know people you can grab pads from your country's storage area.  Ask around.

The sun set quickly, but luckily other climbers brought lights.

The quartzite at Rocklands is so climbable!  This one medium sized block has eleven steep problems on it.  And the stone is so solid.  Everything I tried was high quality fun!

I went back to my guest house and posted to Instagram.  

A few minutes later I got a message from Graham "You here?!?!? Lezzzz rage!"

I couldn't believe my luck.  Not only was Graham at Rocklands, he had a full crew from Bishop along with him.  I went from traveling alone to being part of the crew!  Their psych and beta helped me climb some really fun lines!  And I supported the crew whenever I could.  Graham, Annie, Clarky, Ilah, Ian, and Lisa, the entire crew was great, and I was so psyched to get to know everyone.

Lisa climbing a line out an arch called "Sex Etiquette" 6C

A shot of me climbing the same line.

We had rainy rest days when I didn't get photos.  The flowers and waterfalls were beautiful when the sun came back out.

We all hung out a lot!  At South African barbecues called "braais" and in the sauna Nalle and Scott Noy built by the river.  Graham attempted to get good shots for my dating profile when I wore my shoes designed by Jason Mamoa.

We visited a lot of different zones and I got some photos I like. Here's Ilah climbing "The Roof is On Fire" 

Sometimes bouldering is like site seeing, Ulan Bator 7b+ is one of the most beautiful lines ever!

Another highlight of the trip was climbing with Nalle.  Nalle put up the hardest boulder problem in the world, the world's first V17, in 2016.  He's a legend, and he was developing entire sectors at Rocklands during the 2021 season.  

Nalle sending an interesting 7c.

I watched him put up this line.  He rapped and cleaned this line in ten minutes and climbed it in the next ten.  It's probably 7c+, but I'm not sure what he named it.

I wanted to learn from Nalle.  So I paid attention, and here are a few climbing related lessons I picked up.

- Think through boulder problems before getting on them to experiment.  Don't waste any energy.

- Heel hooks can be dynamic.  In some situations they can slide, in others they can be repositioned from a higher hand position.

- Support others early in the session and get to your thing at the end of the day.  Be patient.

While Nalle developed 7c+ and harder, I was happy with 7a+.

My favorite project was at the Fields of Joy.

It was 7b, and I managed to get it done on my last session of the trip.

I'm not going to explain everything I saw or did, because this is a climbing blog.  But seeing the baboons was incredible.  They climb so well and bark at you from the cliffs.  A part of nature telling you to go away.  I didn't listen.

The birds and deer, and new flowers you see there are all so interesting.  The people are kind, and seemed happy to me.  I recommend checking out the rock art areas, and giving yourself some time to see more of South Africa.  Neel's Cottage was also a great place to stay, with friendly owners at a lower price than de Pakhuis.  

That's all the advice I have for this post.  Make the trip happen!

Time in the Desert

     It’s obvious that time, wind, and water cut through the landscape at different speeds. You can see it in the rocks.  As a society, we’ve decided in advance that time is constant.  That it ticks away at a constant rate just like a clock.  But clocks are the only thing that change at a constant rate, they were artificially contrived to do so after centuries of tinkering, and even the most perfect clocks are subject to the effects of relativity.  Time is a useful idea for science and capitalism, but not nearly as useful in the desert.  Things change.  Often in a predictable direction, but never at a constant rate out here.  The canyon bottom will barely change for two years, then the rains suddenly wash in, all the sand and rocks get moved around, and for years there will be a new log stuck in place across the canyon gap thirty feet above the stream bed.  Things don’t change at constant rate for people either.  Children grow at different rates, a new wrinkle shows up as a surprise. 

 

      But change never completely stops for us, and we can imagine that if there was a place where the wind never stopped people would find it useful to think of the wind as a constant.  They would design a sensitive windmill and count exactly how many revolutions it would take to push a sailboat a certain distance.  Their experiments with a sensitive and standardized windmill would be repeatable and useful, but would say nothing about the underlying assumption the society had made about the wind.  Only a traveller who visited a new place, a place where the wind was so weak as to be imperceptible could realize that their society’s assumption was just a useful illusion.  That traveller would see that the wind isn’t constant.  And as a desert traveller you can see that time is like the wind.  Time blows us around like chaff, while the stone stands still.

     Yes, the stone stands still from our perspective.  But if we could be the wind itself, moving the sand from place to place, scouring the stones with our energy, seeing them shrink, collapse and turn into sand dunes over the eons, we would know that the rocks are ever changing.  The wind is time to the stone. Time without the wind affects it not at all, and the wind has all the time in the world. Ann Zwinger said it best “The rock changes, the channel changes, the wind just carries air from one place to another, more constant than the rock.  The rock is ephemeral, the wind, eternal.”  We  are so ridiculously ephemeral in comparison to this landscape.  Ephemeral enough to see the boulders stand still, put up climbs on them, and watch another generation climb on them too.

 

Bouldering in the Wind River Range PDF is now available!

 

It's been bothering me that my guidebook to Sinks Canyon, Devil's Kitchen and Sweetwater is out of print.  So I found a way to make a pdf available on Patreon for just $5.00 Have a great time out there!

My Patreon Shop

Life on the Road (Late Summer 2022)

 I miss bouldering blogs.  And I think you should be the change you want to see in the world.  So I've decided to start blogging again.

We had the plan for years.  To sell the house in Fruita, and give nomadic life a shot once the girls were finished with high school.  To find out first-hand if Ashley and I really could dramatically cut our costs, and spend years on the road, by selling our house and not buying a new one for a while.  But I never could have envisioned how the plan would end up happening.  That our marriage would fall apart before the plan could take effect, the two years stuck holding together broken pieces of what we'd built while working through the divorce, or that I would still end up following our original plan by traveling alone.  I'll explain more in upcoming posts. But for now just know that I've been living with a truck, without a house, since mid-August, and that I'm enjoying it.  There's a lot to write about, let's start with my first couple months on the road. 

The first day felt really strange after leaving the house closing.  Normally I'd just drive home after getting my errands done for the day, but I had no home to go to.  It was hot in Grand Junction.  Way too hot to hang out in my truck or sleep anywhere close to town.  But I couldn't leave for Wyoming, or the mountains, quite yet.  My adventure buddy Josephine was flying in the next day for a backpacking trip into the San Juans. We had planned it together before I knew when my house would close.  "Who is Josephine?!" and "How did David become her adventure buddy?!"  It's quite a story, too long for this post.

I needed elevation. So I decided to drive up into the Book Cliffs north of town.  The air was cooler up there.  But when I opened my food bin, everything in it was absolutely covered in melted chocolate.  The first of many lessons I've learned living on the road. You can't keep chocolate bars in a food bin in summer.  So pack Peanut M&M's instead.  

Dramatic lightning surrounded me in the truck that first night in the Book Cliffs. But the storms all went around me.  I took it all in. A beautiful moment, a good omen, an exciting start to the adventure.

The San Juans were absolutely gorgeous! Some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen.  And it felt triple good to be up there.  For one, I was backpacking with friends in one of the prettiest places on Earth. Two, I was starting a very large new adventure of undetermined duration. And three, I wasn't stuck in a classroom stressed out about the upcoming school year. These three conditions stacked up into a huge pile of gratitude deeply felt.  It rained some, but we were never caught in it without shelter.  Good times, a great trip!

Next up was a week of dogsitting, and working on the second Unaweep guidebook.  

I like dogsitting. So if you want a dogsitter, and I'm in your area, get in touch!  I get along well with most dogs, follow instructions, and like having access to a table and running water occasionally.

The next month and a half I was back up in Wyoming, and my time up there surpassed expectations in both how at home I could feel without a home, and how productive I could be.  I was immediately climbing with friends at the Rock Shop, both old and new, and saw so many familiar faces in Lander.  And working on the Rock Shop Bouldering Guide both up at the Rock Shop and in the Lincoln Street Bakery was ridiculously efficient!  All the boulders were easily found at the Rock Shop, and all the boulderers were easily found at the bakery.  

I made a couple trips deep into the Winds to get cooler conditions and do some exploration.

My first trip was up to Dinwoody Lakes.  There's a lot less bouldering potential than I expected up there, but with so much high-quality stone I was bound to find something.  A highlight was the first ascent of "Set and Setting" V5, a tricky problem on perfect stone in one of the most beautiful spots I've ever explored.

Autumn joined me for a few glorious days in October.  The leaves were changing, the days were cool, problems were sent, and we had a great time together!  A few days like these are worth a lot.

I finished my Rock Shop book, and the weather was changing.

I revisited Sweetwater.  Amazing as ever, and it hit me especially hard because when I moved to Colorado six years ago I wasn't sure if I'd ever see the place again.  It felt so good to be back there.

Then the nights got too cold, snow was in the forecast, and so it was time to follow the Fall south to Colorado and Utah...  Thanks for revisiting the Lloyd Climbing Blog!  See you again soon.