Dog watching last weekend was lots of fun. I found a doggie that will actually look the camera in the eye! Echo is an awesome Australian shepherd that had a ball hanging out with us and playing with Liv all last weekend.

Took this shot a day or so ago in the afternoon when we had lots of cool multi-layer clouds flowing through. I like how the polarizer really pulled out the reflected yellow hues of the late afternoon sun.

So, it’s Easter and Mark and I are finishing up the taxes. OUCH!!!! This year is especially painful as Mark’s new job did not withhold enough money to cover the taxes on his income, let alone my taxes in a higher bracket than CSU expects for grad students, plus we evidently made a wad of cash on our investments last year that we were less aware of than we thought. So, the IRS is bleeding us for a couple thousand extra on this snowy Easter Sunday.

While Mark was grumbling and cussing and rifling through papers this afternoon, I decided to have a little kitchen adventure, and I put together an appropriate desert for the day. Enjoy!

Bleeding Strawberry Trifle

1 quart fresh strawberries, sliced
1/3 cup good balsamic vinegar

2 cups heavy cream
1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar

1 fresh pound cake
1/3 cup Amaretto liqueur

In a small shallow dish, coat the strawberries with the balsamic vinegar and marinade them in the fridge for at least 15 to 20 minutes (in my case, and hour or two until we get around to making dinner). After the strawberries have marinated, check for sweetness, adding sugar if desired.

In a large bowl using an electric mixer, whisk the cream to soft peaks. Add the vanilla and confectioners’ sugar. Whip until stiff peaks. Set aside.

Using a serrated knife, slice pound cake lengthwise into 1/2-inch thick slices. Carefully cut out a small circle for the bottom of each of the martini glasses. Place small circle in the bottom of the glass and brush cakes Amaretto liqueur. Take a sip of Amaretto liqueur. Add a layer of marinated strawberries. Sprinkle with more sugar if desired. Add a layer of whipped cream.

Add a second layer of cake, this one will be much larger than the first. If your pound cake is shaped like mine, you just put in a whole piece and then knock the corners off. Brush with lots of Amaretto liqueur. Take another sip of the Amaretto. Add another layer of marinated strawberries. Top with a very large dollop of whipped cream. I garnished with small corners of strawberries in the whipped cream. Some recipes recommend amaretto cookie crumbs or mint leaves to garnish.

You can stick these in the refrigerator until serving. Also, use the remaining cake, cream and strawberries to create a few extra, not-as-pretty trifle dishes. If you refrigerate for at least 2 hours, the flavors can marry and it makes everything especially tasty.

Well, the weather this weekend is pretty icky. I guess it’s not quite summer yet. The blossums are out on our trees and flowers are sprouting from the ground. On the Front Range, that means it’s time for more snow!

Mark and I are staying in this weekend and getting stuff done that we’ve been putting off (house work, taxes, stuff like that).

Have a Happy Easter everybody!

I took lots of fun pics on this climb, check them out in the gallery!

Last Sunday was a beautiful, warm, early spring day, so Mark and I decided to continue our tradition of climbing Greyrock as our first multipitch climb of the season. Unfortunately, we got distracted in the morning by various cleaning and home issues, and we ended up realizing somewhere around 11:30am that we had to reorganize and repack all of the climbing gear before we could leave. In a whirl of activity, we ended up leaving the Greyrock trailhead for this long, alpine-ish climb at 12:30p! Yes, we knew it was late. Yes, we brought our headlamps.

We hiked the approach rapidly, but then ended up in a long conversation with a group of climbers up in the area for the first time at the trail intersection. They had two guys just in from Poland and Sweden, and had convinced them to hike all the way to Greyrock for their first ever rock climbs! We found the base of our route after some wandering and bush-wacking almost exactly 2 hours after leaving the trail-head.

The route we decided to try this time was Theodore – 5.6. Here’s how it broke down:

Pitch 1: A long, deep, flaring hand crack. The crack is on a mild slab, and arches a bit to the left. I found it easier to use foot holds all over the face than to spend much time trying to figure out how to jam it. Mark, the crack-master, enjoyed easy jams the whole way up. I think we missed the first belay somewhere on top of the crack, as Mark didn’t belay until about 160ft off the ground just left of the large roof.

Pitch 2: There was nothing spectacular about this one. Rather than head further left into what looked like more interesting climbing, Mark led straight up through low angled fat cracks and small chimneys. Another 130ft of 5.4-ish climbing put us on a huge grassy ledge. Mark’s anchor here was pretty pathetic as he didn’t want to sit so far back from the edge that we couldn’t hear each other. Pretty much, it was one good cam, and the butt belay. This was fine with me as the climbing was so easy I didn’t feel I could put much stress on the belay even if I wanted to.

Pitch 3: Mark and I both agreed after this one that it was the best pitch of the climb. We headed up and right a bit over some bulgy slabs. Right as I scrambled over the second bulge, I had a foothold pop off for the first time ever on Greyrock. I then reached up and grabbed a hold filled with water. I was sooo happy… “Oooo! Alpine climbing is sooo cool!” Quite the adventure. After trying not to get wet in this little seam, we rounded the corner and followed a fantastic 100ft long flake up sweet moderate climbing with an incredible view.

Pitch 3a: Mark sat on top of the end of the flake in a web of slings around rocks and a large tree. He really looked like a big spider in a multi-colored web. I opted to climb through the web and hike up the bushy ledge behind Mark to move the belay under the next crack system. This is the ledge from which the 5.6s variation probably starts. We opted to continue up off the far left side of the ledge.

Pitch 4: This pitch was full of looser rock and lots of lichen. The pro wasn’t great, and Mark decided to angle for the left side of the two roofs above us. He set a belay on a small ledge with a fantastic view. Somehow, this ended up being the airy-ist belay of the whole climb. We were both having a great time, but it was pretty obvious we were going to loose our sun, and we needed to top out pretty darn soon.

Pitch 4.5: Mark led up the gully and over the ledges above us. He stopped after about 50ft. After about 3 minutes of no movement I called up “Mark! What’s going on??” He yells down “I’m on top!” Oh, really? I was expecting another long pitch, but I guess this was it. He took up three quarters of the rope and I climbed up over the lichen-covered terrain. As I popped out onto the large boulder-covered ledge where Mark was belaying, the wind hit me full force. “Wow, check out that dark cloud!” I said. Mark frowned and suggested I continue climbing up over the boulders to the full summit and then bring him up over the last 4th class scrambling. And that I do it quickly.

As I scrambled over the last ledges, I came around a corner and there was a guy standing there in a T-shirt. We both looked surprised to see each other. I asked him directions to the lake on the summit, and he sent me up a little higher. I got to say, the best part of climbing Greyrock is scrambling over the last few boulders and popping out to see this view!

Mark untied the rope and started taking apart the anchor when he heard me talking with, as he put it, “a pedestrian” just off the belay. The wind howled for about 10 minutes as we reorganized the rack and rope, but then calmed down rather quickly as the storm moved off. Somewhere around the top of the 1st pitch, Mark noticed that he left his hiking shoes on the ground. He really didn’t want to hike the three-quarters of a mile down to the packs in his new, unstretched rock shoes. After some experimentation as to whether he could wear my shoes for a while, we settle on him wearing my nice wool socks, and I wear the shoes without them. We left the summit at around 6:30p, or 4 hours after we started the climb. Not exactly alpine fast. Nor was our hike off in any way quick.

I left Mark sitting on the trail with all of the gear at the bottom of the rock and jogged off into the darkening trees to try to find our bags. While I was gone he, thankfully, reorganized all of the gear so we could pack it up in a nice manor. We headed off on our hike out at around 7:10, and made it back to the car in the pitch dark at just after 8p. A great way to spend an afternoon, and a really cool way to finish a fun climb.

So, there has to be something wrong with me, right? Some kind of learning disability or old brain tumor or something. I just went back and read most of these posts. Ok, so my tenses are a little confused recently, and that’s mostly because the voices of authors I’m reading right now are unfortunately seeping in.

No, what I want to apologize for is my spelling. Most specifically this (which I just found out. Seriously. I didn’t realize this until just now):

Lead is the present tense of the verb. Pronounced with a long ‘e’. As in “Mark leads the climb.”

Led is the past tense. Pronounced with a short ‘e’. As in “I led the climb for the 18th time and I still fell at the third bolt.” For years now, I’ve been pronouncing it correctly but spelling it the same as above. Shoot. What was I thinking?

Ah ha! Yes, if you read all the way to the bottom of the dictionary entry, “Lead” can be pronounced with a short ‘e’ as in the metal. As in “I sucked on that paint brush until my teeth fell out from lead poisoning.” So, not crazy. Just didn’t quite have the connections right in that spelling part of the brain.

There’s a few more pictures from the day in the gallery.

On Saturday, our goal of climbing a few more 14ers this spring inspired us to get back up to altitude for just a bit. The forecast was for highs in the mountains of 0C (32F), but the winds were forecast to be near 95kph (~60mph). We decided that high winds would be good practice for the high peaks and went for it.

We left on the Montgomery Pass Trail (just north of Cameron Pass) at around 1:30pm. We were the only car in a parking lot filled with blowing and swirling snow. It’s so cold and windy out that Liv refused to get out of the yellow car. Eventually, we’re geared up and ready for the hike across the road.

Immediately after we enter the trees, the wind disappears! After 5 minutes of up-hill snowshoeing, we were melting in all of our gear and stopped to strip down to just a single fleece. Liv was having the time of her life tearing through the trees and running through the snow. The trail was well marked with blue blazes on the trees, but the ski tracks we were following all headed up to “the bowls”, and we had to break trail for the last half mile or so to treeline.

Within feet of the last few trees, the wind was blasting across the open snow at incredible speeds. Liv ran out into the wind-driven blizzard for just a few minutes and came back entirely coated in snow! I actually managed to step out into the wind and take a few pictures of the pass, but I didn’t have the gumption to hike the last 100m (~300ft). The hike down went quickly, and we were back at the car 4 miles and 3 hours after we started.

Another shot from climbing last weekend. The Cirque of the Cracks (where we were climbing) was quite busy all day long. This is Bruce leading up a hard 5.11 right next to the fun 5.9 I was climbing on toprope. He was working hard here, and told me later this was a spot that he almost pitched off of.