12-7-11 Vantage in the winter

Posted by on December 7th, 2011  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

12-7-11 Vantage in the winter

Drove over to Vantage with my friend Crystal. I met Crystal 3 years ago in Joshua Tree. She was with Brett and Ondi and we spent  half a day climbing together. Later she became friends with Paul and Craig and we all climbed together at various points and places, including Yosemite. She was in town to interview hospitals for her general practice residency which will start in March.

After 7 years of college, including 4 in medical school she has a lot of integrity. We had some great conversations around the campfire, sitting on big rocks in the dirt around our underperforming campfire. Her friend Will showed up at 9 PM saturday and joined us for the second day down at sunshine wall. The weather was perfect with temps around 50 which allowed us to climb in sweats and shirts.

Will is an interesting character. He was raised on a cattle ranch, but sells Comcast door to door in Seattle. At only 21, he has a lot of life behind him, a great job, and a ton of talent on the cliff. I’ve never seen anyone stem those Vantage columns as wide as Will. I hope to be able to hook up with him for some climbing trips.

Good partners are hard to find. Crystal has already left town for medical school in Florida. I’ve got partners scattered all over the country, but finding one right here can be challenging. I miss the easy communication of facebook. I don’t miss facebook, but I miss the ability it has to get you in touch with climbing partners.

I led the spl. beaver route 5.9 and George-Martha 5.10a, both cleanly. G&M was quite easy at the bottom. The off hands jams seemed very solid. A couple were awkward sidepulls, but I never felt I was going to come off. The pro is perfect in there if you have purple, green and red camalots, doubles at least, and triples in the green.

At the wide top section of G&M I went up and down a couple times. It turned out to be a layback with high toe jams and double fist jams protected by a 4 and 5 camalot. I didn’t even grab the flake in the back this time. I just grabbed the ledge above and pulled up into a knee jam. Not graceful, but it got the job done.

I am watching some lynda.com videos on how to develop Android apps. It’s very slow going as I keep getting distracted by work and climbing. The videos require you to download a lot of strange files, and nothing works quite as well for me as it does for him on the videos. Still, this could be something very big, and possibly even something we could add to our curriculum as part of the web programming classes.