One Day at Little Rock City – 36 Hours of Travel, 8 Glorious Hours of Climbing!

This weekend put the finishing touch on what has been for me an insanely busy month. It began with a week long, amazing bouldering trip to Bishop, CA, followed by two and a half weeks in Washington State for work, and in the closing moments of that adventure a new one was conceived! I was invited by two different friends to join them on a climbing trip to Little Rock City for the weekend (ironically the two people in question knew each other but didn’t realize I knew either of them so it was just one big happy climbing family)! As soon as I was sure work was finalized and we were indeed flying home on Wednesday I began to pull together a plan to get me to Chattanooga on Thursday…yep, fly home from Seattle Wednesday and drive to Tennessee on Thursday!

A quick version of the two day plan goes something like this: after traveling all Wednesday, starting in Richland, WA hung-the-hell-over at 5:00 am, I arrived at Tampa airport at 11:30 pm and by the time I picked up my luggage and made it home it was 12:30 am Thursday. I pulled out all my dirty clothes and threw them in the washing machine while unpacking the things I’d need to take with me in the “morning”. Fell into bed at 1:30 am and was up the next morning at 8:00 to finish my laundry, take a shower, and re-pack my clothes, camping gear, and some food by 11:30 when Eric met me at my house, we packed up the car and were on the road around noon. It just so happened that my friend Eric from Vertical Ventures had nothing going on this weekend and was pretty siked for a southern sandstone climbing adventure himself so on really, really short notice (less than 24 hours) he decided to join the fun! We made it to Chatty by 8:00 pm where we picked up some goodies at Greenlife and then met up with Dan, Margaret and company, who had been lucky enough to have spent the day climbing, for some simply amazing burgers at Urban Stack. Following this feast we all headed to Possum Creek Campground were we set up camp to a chorus of barking dogs in the dark and crashed into our various tents and hammocks as soon as humanly possible!

Friday was a simply phenomenal day of climbing! Good friends, lots of laughs, amazing amount of effort put into some unparalleled climbs, problems sent, fingers shredded and of course plenty of projects to come back to! On a personal high note I sent The Wave (V6), a problem that shut me down in a big way the last time I was at LRC. I’ve got to give a heaping round of thanks to Margaret for the beta that got me up it and to Jenny for brushing those slopey holds for me! Sending Swingers (V4) was another highlight of the day as was making progress with Margaret on Dragon Lady; a frustrating problem if you’re on the shorter side but it’ll go for both of us next time! We climbed until at least 7:00 at which point we were all to varying degrees cold, hungry and sore so we headed to downtown Chatty for dinner at the Terminal Brewhouse…we were well rewarded with some damn tasty beers and again, mouthwatering, gourmet burgers!

Unfortunately, despite Dan’s most earnest attempts to will the weather gods to favor us with no rain it began pouring sometime in the wee hours of the morning Saturday in what turned out to be a regional storm (i.e. nowhere in the southeast was dry) so greatly saddened we were forced to abandon day two of climbing and opted to head on home. However, prior to parting ways it was decided that we should have one more meal together and it had to be………waffles! Nothing else would suffice but waffles. So we packed up wet tents, loaded our wet selves into our wet cars, and rolled on into Chatty once more where we were led a merry and epic chase for the ever elusive waffle. Yes, after driving around downtown, stopping at super crowded restaurants with over an hour wait for breakfast (who knew that breakfast was such a popular pastime in Chattanooga), asking locals for advice, walking around in the pouring rain and splashing though puddles we finally found them, the nefarious waffles, at a diner called Longhorn Restaurant around noon! Here much food and many waffles were consumed as we were entertained watching it being prepared by a little old grandma who could flip, fry, scramble, boil, and sauté with the best of them! We then said a very wet good-bye to Dan, Margaret, Jenny, Eric and Tyler in the parking lot and began our journey back to FL. This trip included severe thunderstorm warnings, tornado and hail warnings, torrential driving rain and gusty winds until we were 90 miles from the FL border at which point Mother Nature relented a bit figuring she had successfully curtailed any further thoughts of climbing this weekend! We arrived at my place around 11:00 pm (poor Eric had another 45 minute drive to get back to Tampa). I don’t think I’ve been so exhausted in a long time, although that single day of climbing and catching up with everyone was worth it! I will admit I spent today recovering though, i.e. laying in a hammock in the warm, sunny, beautiful FL weather by the pool…I need to fill up my severely depleted energy reserves for the next adventure already affectionately known as 2^3, a week with Suzanne, Anne, Audrey and Austin at the beach!

The Hanford Experience

While most people would not, perhaps, include their work as an “adventure” there are elements of UXO field work that I feel could certainly apply. Honestly, I’ve had some crazy stories come out of my time in the field that rival some of my travel stories, a fact I believe anyone who’s worked at a UXO site can attest to!

For this particular job there is the actual nature of the site that makes it somewhat “original” and unique. The Hanford Site, where Roy and I have been working for the past two weeks, is a decommissioned (for the most part) nuclear production center that was originally established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project and was home of the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world. To add to its infamy Hanford can lay claim to having developed the plutonium that went into the first nuclear bomb which was dropped over Nagasaki, Japan during WWII. Subsequently the project expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes from which most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal were developed. The manufacturing process has left behind 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste that remains on the site representing two-thirds of the United States high-level waste by volume. Currently the federal government spends $2 billion annually and employs about 11,000 workers on the clean-up effort, despite this Hanford still remains the most contaminated nuclear site within the U.S. In order to work on the site you have to sit though a veritable college curriculum of safety classes covering topics where you learn such things as the difference in the warning sirens you could potentially hear on the site, archaeological training, asbestos avoidance, how to handle potential targeting by foreign spies and terrorists, site specific safety, UXO specific safety, etc, etc, etc….

Given the above, the work Roy and I were out there doing seems the proverbial small potatoes - attempting to clean up UXO (unexploded ordinance) from a formal pistol range along the base of a scared Native American site within the Hanford complex. A typical day meant getting up at the bright and cheerful time of 4:20 am to arrive on site by 6:00 am for the daily safety brief (and stretching, can’t forget the stretching). We’ve spent the last two weeks pushing an EM61 (for those unfamiliar with this instrument it’s a time-domain metal detector) over, around, and through around 61 separate, 100ft x 100ft grids with about 40 pounds of batteries strapped on our backs. This was accomplished typically over varying terrain with the ubiquitous and often completely exasperating sagebrush scattered across the grids in typical Washington weather, cold, rainy, and blustery until 4:00 pm at which point we headed back to our motel (and to be fair this was actually an “easy” site compared to others I’ve been on). Afterward we would download the data, photocopy notes, write up a daily summary of work, charge the heaps of batteries that take up every outlet in your hotel room, head to the gym to lift (first time in years that I’ve seriously lifted weights again and it’s been fun…Roy’s been a great personal coach), then off to grab dinner and crash into bed to repeat the process the following day.

On the weekends things liven up a bit. The first weekend in Richland we stayed local and went out on the town with some of the UXO techs and personnel from the site. We had a great time partying it up at The Pub and Jokers, were many drinks were enjoyed, dancing (dirty and otherwise) took place, and quite a few laughs were shared. We also experienced Jason and Brandon’s combined cooking prowess when we were invited over for a BBQ and movie…the pork chops were spot on and a welcome break from all the restaurant food we’d been eating! The second weekend Roy and I headed west to Seattle where we enjoyed the hospitality of my dear friends Bill and Vanessa. We had a fabulous time hitting up some of Seattle’s plethora of enchanting, delectable, and unique bars and restaurants, climbing at Stone Gardens, eating scrumptious cupcakes (for breakfast nonetheless…at least in Roy’s case…Vanessa and I chose to eat ours at 2:00 am after hours of drinking and if my somewhat fuzzy memory serves me correctly they were scrumptious), seeing old friends and meeting new ones, and participating in a pub crawl that ended in the wee hours of the morning!

Bouldering in Bishop: March 1 – 5, 2011

Five days of bouldering the stunning lines of the Buttermilks, Happys, and Sads has left me in a somewhat bittersweet state of mind. Sweet because the climbing has been, simply put, amazing. Sweet because climbing there moved me along the path on my personal journey to overcome some of my bouldering hurdles/demons…among these, sending some of my tallest (by far) problems to date (and not having a complete melt down mid-way through), working on the mental aspects of my climbing such as not putting limits on what I think I can accomplish (despite this I still had a number of unexpected and very enlightening instances where I initially doubted my ability to work a problem or move but when I actually put effort into it the results were significantly better than expected), as well as the simple joy that comes with climbing a lot of extraordinary rock and sending some classic lines. Bitter because it feels like I was just getting into my climbing groove when I had to leave, because there were still so many incredible boulders I didn’t even get to see, much less get my fingers on, because there were so many projects left unfinished (but that just means I have to come back which, after all, is not a bad thing)!

The climbing in the Buttermilks and Tablelands is radically different but superb in their own unique ways. The Buttermilks are characterized by long, pure, often technical and beta intensive climbs up stand alone quartz monzonite boulders. The Happys and Sads are a jungle gym of rock and boulders – a veritable climber’s playground. The bouldering in the Tablelands tends to be more athletic, bigger holds and bigger moves with varying beta depending on climbing style, height, etc. However, not only is the climbing in Bishop remarkable and varied, but the scenery itself is stunning. The broad vistas afforded from the Buttermilks and the rim of the Tablelands across the breadth of Owens Valley, flanked by the snowcapped Eastern Sierras to the west and White Mountains to the east outlined against a huge blue sky is worth the journey to this majestic land in and of itself.

To add the obligatory hilarity that is a prerequisite for any climbing trip we piled six people (Eric, Jehs, Gus, Patrick, Katy and myself) into one cheap hotel room at the seemingly notorious Thunderbird Motel for five days straight. Sleeping arrangements were interesting – three to one queen sized bed, two in the second bed and me on my sleeping pad and sleeping bag across the floor. Luggage, food, clothes, climbing gear, towels and electronic gadgets strewn across the room in haphazard disarray added to the general chaos. Many trips were made to the delectable and locally famous Erick Schat's Bakery with their 35 cent day old baked goods shelf! As an additional perk we met up with Micah, Stella and Sarah whom we climbed with at some point every day of the trip. Micah served both as our local tour guide, personal climbing coach and spotter extraordinaire! We also met new friends along the way including a group of climbers hailing from Norway; these we met at the local climber’s camp descriptively called “The Pit” one evening on our way to soak in one of the regions many natural hot springs. We ended up having such a splendid time chatting with them that the trip to the hot springs was abandoned and the evening was spent around their camp fire drinking Tecate, passing around a huge bottle of wine, and swapping stories (some among our group consumed substantially more liquid refreshment than the rest of us which led to a fair number of entertaining stories and the obligatory hangover the following day)! In the end it was exceptionally inspiring and rewarding to see everyone climbing so well…to see projects sent, hard lines on-sighted, the effort, blood, sweat and tears everyone put into personal favorite climbs and new friendships forged!

On the last day of the trip I managed to send Fly Boy Arête (V5) on my final attempt! I have to thank Micah for talking us into checking out the Fly Boy boulder in that final hour Jehs and I had left in the Buttermilks, and again for convincing me to have that final go on it before packing up to leave. It was in incredible feeling to walk away with that send in my pocket! Jehs and I then had an enjoyable and leisurely journey back down south to Los Angeles making a stop at Gus and Nancy’s roadside stand along the way for some local honey and various samples of tasty goodies! Thanks to Jehs I was able to enjoy a totally new culinary experience once we reached LA as we dined out at an amazing little vegan restaurant where I sampled vegan chicken wings (delicious…and they even had a little drumstick looking “bone” and all), drunken noodles with vegan chicken, and to finish it off vegan carrot cake! We then had a bit of an adventure returning the rental car and getting back to the hotel but a long soak in the whirlpool bath tub and a gloriously comfortable feather top mattress provided the perfect ending to a wonderful trip!