HCR - Thanksgiving Weekend 2009

Climbers - Josh, Leigh, Morgan, John, Jaime, Conor, Angie & Calvin
Weather - Really, it's November

From

Thanksgiving weekend was a blast. We headed down on Friday morning early and met up with the Krefts and Wilsons to get some holiday climbing in. A 5am start landed us at HCR around 10:30am, and we were on the walls around 11am at the Cliffs of Insanity, by the Roman Wall. There, we climbed some warmups 5.6's and 5.8's with the Wilsons and their extended family visiting from Louisiana. After warming up a little, we headed over to Magoo Rock to sample some of the climbs we hadn't tried before.

Mad props to Jaime for flashing a 5.9+ and .10b on her first outdoor trip, both on lead. Also big props to Josh (aka Big Sexy Daddy, or "BSD") for flashing an .11a on Magoo. All the routes were great fun, although the .11a was more of a short crux; the .10b was more fun and required varied climbing using sidepulls and stemming.

Here's Angie on the 5.9+:

From HCR 11-28-09

We headed down to get comfy in a cabin with daylight failing around 4:45pm, had a couple beers with dinner (thanks again to the Wilson family!) and headed back out to do some nighttime bouldering at the South Idahos. Angie, Josh, John and I climbed on some V1 to V3's, including Crescent, which had thwarted me on the last trip. Topping out in the dark felt a little scary. :)

Day 2 was a bouldering day at the North Forty. We started by the Warmup boulder doing various problems before heading over to the Honeycomb boulder. This boulder has a series of good face problems with a decently high and slopey topout to make you thankful for spotters.

From HCR 11-28-09

At the HC boulder, the quote of the day is attributed to Jaime. John and Jaime worked on the left-most V3 (name?), figuring out beta and trading burns. After John got the send, Jaime immediately said, "Well, I'm not going to be shown up by my husband" and promptly threw down the problem. First V3 outdoors too! Nice job. :)

I sent a V4 two problems to the right of that problem on the same boulder, then looked towards the Leatherface boulder for a good try on the namesake problem, V7. I'd tried this several times on my last trip and felt reasonably sure I could get the send, but it was not to be. I ended up getting very close to making the last crux move and linked it from the middle a few different times, but couldn't pull it off. John & Jaime even tried to motivate me by telling me Big Steve Xu had crushed the problem (not going to let some kid show you up, are you?), but even that wasn't enough to get me up the boulder. Heh.

Around mid-day, we had to say good-bye to the Krefts. The Wilsons had left that morning to return to St. Louis because of a prior commitment, so it was just Angie and I. Angie was saving skin for the next day and I was wrecked, so we called it an early day.

We awoke to a gloomy Day 3 and hurriedly packed the car fearing rain would shorten our day. Angie had never done the routes at the North 40, so we had a good time running up a 5.7, 5.8, another 5.8 and a 5.10a to the left of Crimp Scampi (name eludes me). Angie did a great job with the send of the .10a second go. I had spied a V5/5.12a/b 30 foot route on the backside of the Warmup Boulder and took a recon burn on that. The V5 has apparently been solo'd several times by intrepid boulderers, but it's a full 35 feet tall with the crux at the very top. I fell at the very end on my second go (roped up), and that would be a very scary move to pull that high up. The fall would almost certainly result in a hospital trip (or worse) because of a large tree directly in the fall zone.

We had to get back to St. Louis early, so we packed it up and called it a day. Nice weekend trip. Here are the rest of the pics.