Archive for 2008

Last night Kate asked me if I wanted noodles from the similarly named chain restaurant. Of course I want noodles, I love noodles! On the way to the restaurant, we gave Doug and Liz a call to see if they wanted to join us and share Liz’s experience with the tornadoes of the day (she works in Windsor, CO). I thought it a little odd that we invited them when we were two-thirds of the way to one step above fast food, but they were up for it and met us at Noodles. Near the end of dinner, Liz declared that she wanted to do something else and I mentioned that I had wanted to head home to purchase and play the newly released Penny-Arcade game. I then accidentally used profanity in the vicinity of lots of children, but none seemed to notice. Kate suggests we go to check and see if Indiana Jones had any tickets left. Sure, why not… it’s opening night and we might get lucky.

At the ticket counter, Kate had a voucher for tickets! And so did Liz!
“When did you buy these”, I asked, thinking it was probably earlier in the evening.
“Last week”, Kate replied.
I was astounded. With a slack-jawed look on my face I started rewinding my week and connecting conversations with this secret plan. It was a conspiracy! Sweeeet! Kate was hoping for a big hug, but mostly I reacted with shock and a far-away look as I put together all the events which were driven by this plan.

How was the movie? It was fun. I was a little nervous about the time gap in this series and thought we might be getting another debacle on in the same way that Episode 1 was to Star Wars, but it was light and fun.

So, when the word went out that there was a huge tornado on the ground about 10 miles from the Atmospheric Science department where I work, what did everybody do? That’s right! We ran up onto the roof to go see if we could see it!

We had a great view of the horizon from our perch on top of one of the highest buildings in the whole area. This made us aware of lightening danger, but not concerned enough to go inside. On a clear day, we can easily see past Windsor to the south and all the way into Wyoming in the north. On Thursday, however, the skies were filled with clouds, rain, and fog, so we never got a clear view of the funnel cloud.

After the storm rained itself out, our skies cleared up a bit, and we got a view of the HUGE cumulonimbus thunderhead above the storm, and eventually the remnants of the wall cloud which includes the upper part of the wide funnel. I uploaded the videos to You Tube, enjoy!

Yes, I am a big weather geek. I spend a lot of time rock climbing and hiking, but my day job is atmospheric dynamics research. So on the morning of May 22, I was happily working away when my office mate announced that a tornado had just touched down north of Greeley, Colorado.

This was especially exciting because my husband Mark works about 20 miles south east of me, and the initial storm track had the vortex heading straight for both Mark and our house! Thankfully, for us, the storm trended more to the north, and Mark saw only high winds and hail. Throughout the day, though, storms appeared in our area and tornados touched down all around us. There is a preliminary storm report at the national weather service if you click here.

It’s been a while since I posted a high resolution image, so I thought I would dig one out. I took this shot at Vedauwoo last weekend with the intension of using the actual photo as a desktop. But looking at it on the computer, I found the high detail distracting. So, I used a little bit of software filtering to turn down the detail just a tad.

I’ve saved the image as a few different sizes for the most common screen resolutions. Feel free to down load the one that works for you by clicking on the size below the image!

1024 x 768, 1440 x 900, 1600 x 1200

“Vedauwoo filter(s) out the weak, the soft and the spineless, which leaves better company for you.” – Todd Skinner

After dinner on Saturday night Doug and Liz headed home, and Mark and I cuddled up for a windy Wyoming night of camping. On Sunday morning, we had origionally planned to try to get in a training hike for our upcoming climb of the Grand Teton, but we weren’t feeling motivated. Instead, we substituted the long-ish (20 minutes) approach to Plumb Line Crag.

After our arduous journey, through cow pastures and sage brush, we came upon another group of climbers racking up for the climb we were looking for: the infamous Plumb Line (5.9+) itself! Only two of the three climbers in the group planned to climb the route, the third was a friendly girl who had a much nicer camera than I and was pulling out some good stops for some great photos. In deference to her, I ended up not taking any pictures at the cliff. So, I’ll borrow one from MP.com (below).

Plumb Line is a beautiful, perfect, hand crack: 50ft long and slightly overhanging. It’s an old-school 5.9, the difficulty graded back in the days when 5.10 didn’t exist. Mark and I have oogled the climb before, but never attempted it. Today, it was our only plan, so we decided to be patient and hang out while the other group had a go.

We chatted with the first leader, who said their group was from Boulder. The leader described learning to climb years before in SoCal, and that Vedauwoo was giving him a chance to pull out tricks from Joshua Tree that he hadn’t used in a while. His second was a route setter at THE premier bouldering gym in Boulder (the Spot), and he complained a bit that morning that he may have been bouldering too much lately. They both did a great job on Plumb Line, with the leader taking a few worthy falls as he “went for it” on gear!

Mark scrambled around to the rap anchors and worked on setting up a TR for us. This was a little tricky because the crack had a perfect rope-wedging cleft at the top of the crack, and all we had to run the rope over was a hex that was slightly too big. Mark figured it out eventually and then it was our turn to climb!

Mark did a fantastic job, of course. He pulled into the crack and then was on top of the rock in 6 or 7 long, smooth, loping moves. He kept hands and feet in the crack, and had beautiful technique throughout the climb. I, on the other hand, managed to ‘climb two moves and fall’ all the way to the top. Two moves and fall. Two moves and fall. On my second lap I got more into the rythm and was able to string together more than two moves. It almost started to feel good! Or at least I felt like throwing up a little less when I topped out. Mark’s second lap was faster and smoother than his first, and as he rapped off he declared that he would be ready to go for a redpoint the next time we were in the area!

I should mention as we were working Plumb Line, the group of Boulder boulderers had moved to our left, and the route setter had decided to tackle a nasty overhanging off-width Big Pink (5.11b) – one of Bob Scarpelli’s favorites. They borrowed our #4.5 and #6 cams to round out their rack for the menacing 8 inch wide crack.

That guy gave Big Pink a huge fight. He made it about 12 feet up before taking a hard lead fall onto our biggest cam. That’s when something weird happened. The cam had been placed into the crack in the normal manor, with the grip facing horizontally out. When the leader took that big fall, the cam’s lobes dug into the crystaline granite and, at the same time, the whole giant piece of pro rotated 90-degrees as it caught his down-ward fall. There was a huge “CRACK!” and smoke or dust actually came drifting out of the crack. The cam was left in an awful position, with two lobes pressed all the way in and two out like an umbrella.

We all agreed that part of the rock must have cracked under load, and that we had just seen what happens when you fall on a smaller cam, but at a really big, slow scale. Pretty wild. The leader carefully placed the other #6, and hung on it while he worked our cam out of the crack. He then went back to the heavy work of climbing the route, and eventually made it up, as did his second.

Mark and I were interested in trying this offwidth. It had been a long, hard fight for both the Boulder boulderers, and they hadn’t used any heal-toe or chicken wings or our usual methods of offwidth climbing. So, now we have two more goals for Vedauwoo. Redpoint Plumb Line and climb Big Pink!

We’ve been watching storm after storm blow through Wyoming, waiting for months for the snow to melt and the skies to clear up long enough to get back on that old Ved granite. And, finally, this weekend we made it. There are some nice pictures in the gallery.

Doug and Liz agreed to join us for camping on Friday night and climbing on Saturday. After hearing about the astounding and enigmatic Beehive Buttress from Dylan and Ann last fall, Mark and I asked Doug and Liz to show how to find the place. The rock is hidden northwest of just about every other rock in Vedauwoo, and required a half hour of driving into a remote wooded area of the mountains.

Vedauwoo has a long history. The guidebook actually lists very few FA’s, and the reason given is that it is assumed that local Native Americans most likely ascended many of the routes long before pioneers arrived. More recent climbing history has established a very strong traditional ethic. There are only a handful of bolted routes, all of which are protected carefully and sparsely. There are rumors that people who have added bolts to climbs have been severely punished.

Which is why I was so shocked when Dylan came back to Fort Collins last fall with tales of a massively bolted sport crag in Vedauwoo. This place isn’t in any guidebook, and not on any websites. And that is probably good for the health of the people who installed all of that hardware.

We enjoyed a great day climbing under a hot sun. Unlike Dylan (who seemed to have some insider information), I cannot give names or grades for the climbs. I know nothing about the place!

We started with the two easy climbs to the far left, and I did a rusty, slow, lead of the one on the right. We moved further to the right and climbed four other more difficult routes. So, in all, I ticked off 6 long pitches that day, which was a long day for me. Mark and Doug climbed one more ultra long route, bringing their total up to 7 pitches for the day. We hiked out hungry, tired, sore and sunburned (some of us more than others…) at the end of the day.

We’ve had a cool, wet spring so far. Here’s a shot of clouds growing over Fort Collins this afternoon.

Somehow, in the course of procrastination or avoidance, I came across a blog post with a link to a link to a link to this wild compilation of on-line video: Biggest Rock Climbing Falls Caught on Video. I highly recommend clicking through and watching the whole collection. They actually made me feel really good about our safety system!