Archive for October, 2007

Thought I would write just a little bit about the cool foggy mornings we’ve been having along the Northern Front range this week. Dylan has a particularly awesome picture of our morning pea soup up on Flickr right now.

I’ve actually heard a lot of theories to explain this lately, but I think what happened was a mixture of local and large-scale weather. Locally, we had a pretty intense rain event, that left the ground very wet (saturated, almost).

Evaporating moisture from the surface condenses in the cool dry air that moved in behind the frontal system that brought the rain. Makes sense. Check out the temperatures (red line) and dew points (blue line) the last couple of days:

On the large-scale though, the storm system has moved off to the east, and has been sending little bits of cloudiness our way. The satellite makes this fog look like part of the cloud system just getting trapped in our little bit of local valley.

When you sit at near 1,000ft above the storm to your east, it’s easy to get outflow from big storms at ground level. And pretty cool! I’ve enjoyed watching the fog flow in and lift out so much lately, that I made a little movie from the web cam that sits on top of my building. Enjoy!

Lots of great shots up in the gallery!

On their last day in town, Mark and I decided to take his parents up to Vedauwoo for an afternoon hike. Snow had fallen over the area the night before, and the Box Canyon trail wove up through the Turtle rocks covered in a light layer of wet, melting snow.

Vedauwoo is an amazing and mysterious place. Each season the light changes, the trees change, and it seems the rocks themselves change. Mark and I have spent so much time there this summer, that the Turtle Rock formation felt like a whole different place with snow on the ground and water running over the rocks.

We hiked to the top of the trail, and everybody thoroughly enjoyed the view. I scrambled over to a large flat area and Mark took a bunch of shots of me doing yoga. It didn’t take us long to get up there, and we made it back to the car right around two hours. I don’t know how long the hike is, but Mark’s parents felt it was not too steep and not too long, and perfectly fun. They both had so much fun, they hope to head back to Vedauwoo someday.

There’s some nice shots from the day in the gallery.

With Mark’s parents visiting for the weekend, we decided to show them some of the sites. The Poudre Canyon is a local spot of beauty, and the overcast skies provided a perfect opportunity for long exposure shots of the river. The fall colors were beautiful, the river was low, and the wind whistled through the dry leaves leaving the quiet ominous feeling of an incoming storm.

There’s blurry photos from the day in the gallery.

The story begins last April, when Mark and I paid $325 for a half vegetable share and a full fruit share of the Colorado State University Community Supported Agriculture (CSU CSA) program. This is a large organic vegetable garden that is part of the CSU horticulture research department. We paid for a share in the spring, and for the past 20 weeks we’ve gotten a huge pile of food to take home and eat every Thursday afternoon. The garden/farm has been a huge producer this year of everything from melons, to corn, to tomatoes, onions, peppers, broccoli, kale, chard, spinach, eggplant and various other herbs and veggies, too numerous to count.

At the beginning of October, we received the first of our killing frosts, and the growing season was officially over. On Harvest Day, we drove out to the farm for the first time (until now, we had been picking up previously harvested food on the college campus). We spent almost two hours ranging the fields, filling a huge bin with our own dug carrots, broccoli, spinach, leeks, kale, pumpkins, squash, peppers and even raspberries. It was so nice to have Mark’s Mom and Dad there with us, who have kept veggie gardens for years, and knew all kinds of useful tips about things as varied as “how to pull carrots out of the ground without leaving the bottom half in” and “how to recognize spinach when it just looks like a weed between rows.”

At the end of the day, we enjoyed fire-roasted chillies, stone soup, and carrying home the three biggest pumpkins in the whole patch.

Sunday night we spent making a huge batch of some of the freshest, best tasting vegetable soup you can find anywhere. And we, in fact, found it in the mud and dirt of our own home town. I think that’s about the coolest food you can make.

Malcolm Gladwell has been one of Mark and my heros ever since we listened to Blink while traveling around to climbing and mountain biking trails last summer. I remember driving Rachel home from Vedauwoo one day last year, playing his book. Mark and I were fascinated by the story of New Coke, and Rachel was sound asleep in the back seat. Oh well.

Here he is in a speech about revolutions in marketing from the food industry that have brought bountiful choice to American grocery stores. In the end, this actually leaves me wondering. I do love my coffee milky and weak, but was the explosion of choice good or bad? The Omnivore’s Dilemma might argue the opposite point, but its nice to see both sides of the tomato. As it were.

The weather has cooled off enough for me to grudgingly pull my big down coat out of the closet for my pre-dawn dog walks this week. On the first morning, I tried to forestall the depression of the loss of another beautiful summer by exploring the pockets of the coat as if they were a favorite climbing destination that I hadn’t visited in years. “Hey! I remember that!” It’s fun to find stuff that you haven’t seen in months.

This year my pockets contained: gloves (of course), nail clippers (necessary for all of those winter trips to the rock gym), a sticker from the Fort Collins Windpower Program (I suppose that was supposed to go on the car), and the coup-de-grace: a camping permit from the Colorado National Monument.

Ah, it must have been the last time I wore the coat. We spent a spring weekend camping and climbing at the monument. Good Memories. We should go back this fall.

More pictures from they day are up in the gallery!

Well, my forecast for the weekend officially bombed. While Mark and I were kind of looking forward to a quiet, cold, wet, fall day at home, Dylan and Ann called us from Vedauwoo on Saturday morning with the news that the weather in Wyoming was perfect for climbing. I checked the updated models and saw a good chance that we wouldn’t see rain until that night, so we threw the already packed packs in the car and took off to the north.

We got there and Dylan and Ann were already starting up a sunny day climb of Ed’s Crack. Ann has been working so hard on her trad leading, and this climb was the culmination of a long, hard, fun summer for her. It was a beautiful lead up a beautiful climb. Dylan seemed really happy to be the belay slave on a pretty day like that also.

After cheering Ann up the first pitch of their climb, Mark and I wandered over to Fall Wall, a sunny slab that we’ve barely ever climbed on, despite it’s perfect rock and popular moderate climbs. There were a couple of other climbers there when we arrived and Val, Star, Jen and Sarah helped us with our packs and spent the afternoon climbing on the sunny rock with us.

Mark hopped first on a lead of Drop Zone which our book called a 5.9, but MP.com calls 5.10a. Mark spent a lot of time trying to convince me to lead this climb, but I wouldn’t hear it. Mark’s lead was very nice, but full of a fair bit of whining, complaining, and, in the end, admission that it was a tough technical lead that I would not have enjoyed right now. I did enjoy following on TR, though, and the thin slabby moves were loads of fun. And dancing across the delicate and airy traverse was a beautiful little bit of climbing. Afterwards, we both ran up and down Cold Finger (5.7) on TR from the same anchor.

The third climb of the day was my lead of EO Lieback (5.5). This a trad climb I’ve been wanting to lead for years, and I finally got my redpoint on a solid lead that day. It was a bit over protected, however. I hit the vertical section of the climb and didn’t like the stoppers I kept plugging in, and ended up with about 4 extra pieces of gear in that section. Oh well. After finishing the climb, I went back and lead it on my own gear (pink point) just to spend a little more time on the sharp end. Mark followed and cleaned the gear, assuring me that all of the pieces were actually pretty good.

After that, we decided to run up and down EO Friction (5.5) because it was quick and easy on this top rope. As I was climbing, Dylan and Ann showed up happy from their climb, and exhilarated with Ann’s lead. I was also proud of my little leads, so we were happy all around as we packed up and headed home for the day.

The rest of the photos from the weekend are up in the gallery.

I’m going to start re-dating some of these posts to help them make as much sense as I can. It seems to be a common method amongst bloggers that might not get around to writing about an even until a few days (or weeks later).

Well, Sunday morning we woke up nice and early to a howling chinook wind screaming down the mountains in Estes Park. Even better climbing weather than the day before! (ok, so that was sarcasm). We puttered around a bit, getting coffee and talking to the guys at one of the local climbing shops about bouldering. Then we drove to the new parking lot for Lumpy Ridge, put on every piece of clothing we owned, and headed out on our hike.

As we wandered down the trail, the wind calmed down, and the sunny morning began to warm up. We hit the end of our trail near one of the random thousands of rock formations in Lumpy and immediately knew that we were going to have trouble finding our climb for the day. An hour and a half of scrambling later, and we arrived at the bottom of something that, regardless of whether or not it was our climb, looked climbable.

Our goal for the day had been Rock One Route (5.4), which we had a nice detailed topo of from my new guidebook Serious Play: An Annotated Guide to Traditional Front Range Classics 5.2-5.9. While I have definitely enjoyed reading this book, I think it was one of the two major sources of trouble for us that day. The first and most obvious source was that we don’t climb in Lumpy much and just don’t know the area well, which is a problem for a place as vertical and remote as that. The second was that the book gave no information as to what the bottom of the climb looked like, how far to hike past the trail junction, and once we were on the climb, the topo generally did not match up with what we had climbed. We were both pretty sure we were not on the right climb the whole time we were up there.

I lead up what was probably the approach as a long pitch, and then stopped and finished the last gully as a second pitch to help with rope drag. From the little Christmas Tree described as being near the beginning of the start of the first pitch, the rock looked creepy, vertical, and definitely exposed. I lead out the rest of the ledge, and then picked a crack that went up and seemed to offer decent pro for a while. I got in one good piece on the ledge, and from the stance about 10ft above that realized that what looked like a good crack was just a little bottoming groove in the rock. I wasn’t sure what to do, so eventually I wiggled in half of a red nut and then just started climbing. Leading on a slab with no gear, with a whistling wind and so much air around me is something I have never done before. I kept telling myself “Don’t Panic, Don’t Panic” and then when I realized this was making me want to panic, switched to a more positive mantra like “I can do this, I can do this…”

A few eternally long seconds later and I reached a good crack. I immediately set an (actually bomber) belay, and then brought up Mark. I suppose I was supposed to keep climbing from here, but I was in no shape. The wind was biting and I was shivering uncontrollably either from cold or adrenaline. Mark came up with the pack, anchored in, and I got my fleece out. Then I broke down and laughed and cried wildly at the same time for about 5 minutes. It was a big moment for me, and Mark hugged me understandably and said “Welcome to trad leading, Kate.”

I lead up one more short, fun pitch of diagonal crack climbing, then set a belay over a big grassy gully. We scrambled down into the gully, collectively decided we were either entirely off route or on the wrong climb, and judging by the number of rappel anchors we found in the area, thought that other people made similar decisions here too. We found one short rappel that got us back to the gully west of the rock, and then hiked out. From the road, it looked like we were on the right rock, near the right route, but only made it about half way up. I suppose I could go back and finish the climb, but I’m not sure why this climb was listed among the classics at Lumpy, as the rest of the climb looked filled with brushy gullies and cracks, and not a lot of fun. I could go back and lead the rest of the way to the top, but I think I got the fun pitches done, and learned what I needed to that day. That I am capable of these things, and should not be afraid to take the risks and have fun!