Photos

Organ Pipes (aug 29)

April 5, 2015

We picked Organ Pipes to be our last climb on Lumpy Ridge. This was our last day in Estes Park Colorado. We had been camping just inside the Rocky Mountain National Park at the Aspen Glen campground and it was a short drive to the Lumpy Ridge parking area.

As we approached the parking area, the Twin Owls are impossible to miss. They look exactly like two roosting owls. Below them, just in front of them, is a light colored triangle of rock. It actually took us a bit of hiking around to find our climb. But as we drove away, we realized Organ Pipes is tucked in the shadow, just to the left of the big triangle of light-colored rock. When we reached the top of the climb, we were at the base of the Owls.

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Above is the view looking up Organ Pipes — it literally looks like organ pipes. Some of the undulations are easily grabbed by hand, some are large enough for you to stand in, or to work up them like a miniature chimney. It’s about 20 feet wide and runs up about 150 feet. Near the top, the rock changes colors from this dark grey, to a lighter color, and it just happened to change colors where the shadow fell. So there’s a ledge at the top of the grey, where Mike eventually set up a belay station and snapped about 300 photographs.

 

The video above gives you a quick tour of where the climb is situated.

Above is a small selection of the many spectacular photos Mike took. Throughout our trip, he was learning to use his camera and this climb was the culmination of him getting to try everything since the climb was pretty easy, with a short pitch where we could easily see each other and communicate.

 

The vertigo-inducing video above makes the climb seem steeper than it really was. The further we climbed, the steeper it was, but it was “only” vertical at the top — it doesn’t overhang or lean out at all. You can begin to hear that it’s getting windier…

 

This isn’t a “bolted” climb; Meaning there are no bolts in the rocks for easily climbing in fall protection. As Mike climbed first, he placed “protection” into the rocks. As I climbed up second, I had to stop and “clean” all the gear. The video above gives you a glimpse of how you spend a lot of time when you are “the second.” Pausing — hopefully in a spot where I only need one hand to hang on — while carefully disassembling “trad gear”. (“trad” is short for “traditional”.)

Three more shots of me just about to top-out on the first pitch. By this point, Mike and I are only a few feet apart and he’s bored out of his mind from sitting in his harness watching me climb.

 

Above is just a few moves from the very end of the first section of the climb. All the junk over my shoulders, and hanging from my harness is all stuff I’ve “cleaned” along the way. At the belay station, I’ll pass all that stuff back to Mike. If this was a long (that is, “multi[ple] pitch”) climb, he’d start off again, and we’d repeat the climb/clean/pass-gear cycle over and over.

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Above is a beautiful shot of a textbook belay anchor. Mike has four pieces of gear in the crack (the lowest one is pretty well hidden from view.) They’re slung together in a very particular way using a special rope (called a “cordelette”) with a very particular arrangement of knots. At the belay point, the arriving “second” would tie in, and pass his cordelette to the lead climber. (So the lead climber has a cordelette to build the next belay station.)

For this climb, the second pitch is very short. Mike could easily have climbed all the way to the top. But by stopping at the ledge, he had a great view of my climb so he could practice with his camera. This final section of rock pitched up to just the slightest overhang, and was perfectly smooth. Took me at least 15 minutes to climb 10 feet using the crack in the rock and side wall.

At the top, catching my breath at the foot of the owls. From here it was a “walk off” down the angled “roosting ramp” to a foot trail and a stroll back to the van.

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Back at our camp site, we took one last look at Deer Ridge already talking about coming back to have another go at climbing it. We packed up our camp site and headed south, back to Boulder.

Goodbye Estes Park and Lumpy Ridge!

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Deer Ridge (aug 28)

March 18, 2015

Epic: This was meant to be the first climb as part of our 24 hour challenge. A classic bush-wack approach to the base of the rocks at sunrise. Then 5 pitches of traditional climbing finishing at the overlook on top of the mountain.

We got up at 4:30am, having packed everything the night before. It was pretty chilly and we were facing a good hour-and-a-half stomp through the woods. Our plan? …walk straight through the campgrounds — literally through camp sites and out the back of the campground. Then, head directly up hill until twilight brought us a good view of the mountain.

 

 

Initially, we were walking through grass-carpeted woods, and through a small meadow atop a little hill. But the further we went, the steeper it got. Until it turned into a true “class 3” scramble.

Twilight was upon us as we reached the base of the lowest spire.

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We reached the base of the rocks moment before dawn.

…and this is what the dawn “Alpine glow” looks like at 8,000 feet on Deer Mountain.

 

Giddy as school children — and possibly a wee bit oxygen deprived — we took a break to sight-see.

 

The final approach phase — yes, this is all just to get TO the climbing — is to duck around the lowest spire and climb up another 500 feet. To the left of the nose is a gently sloping shoulder called Stagway.

We totally loved that the “Notice” sign, had been there so long, that the actual notice was gone. The view from Stagway was beyond awesome, and was well worth the two hours of extreme labor to reach it’s ~8,500′ above sea level view point.

At this point, we could finally walk up to the base of the climb and assess. We were facing 30+ mph wind gusts, storm/rain clouds coming down the valley, and the first section was 80 vertical feet of crack climbing. (ie, there are no hand holds on the rock, just a crack to wedge your fingers and hands into.) We discussed it for a while, and I eventually called it off. It was just too many things weighing on the wrong side of the equation.

 

We snacked and discussed climbing the random looking stuff directly above Stagway. Unfortunately, the climbing guide said all the climbable lines were on the nose and to the right. On the plus side, it would be easier (in terms of technical difficulty) than climbing the nose, and just for a perk, it would be opening a new line. (Meaning no one had ever climbed it.) We figure that after one section through this stuff on the left, we could traverse back to the right, and continue up the nose’s progressively easier sections.

Unfortunately, this is also where we stopped taking photos and video as things went from being “fun”, to being “hard work.”

We setup and started up through the randomness above Stagway. After a long, long time slowly feeding rope to Mike, he stopped climbing and setup a belay point totally out of my sight. (Remember, it’s windy so we can’t communicate at all beyond a very simple rope-pulling system.) Eventually, I started up after him. I won’t say it was a mistake, because it was still fun at parts. But we spent nearly two hours, gaining about 50 vertical feet. I seriously thought Mike had been trying to write his name on the wall as I followed the rope up and down (down?!) left to right across the rocks. There was a lot of tricky climbing, and a tremendous amount of effort for almost no vertical gain.

Finally, at our first belay, with only half the gain we needed to go around the nose’s first section, we both decided to bail off. Bailing from the middle of a mountain requires leaving gear behind; You have to build an anchor, and then rappel from that anchor. You can pull your rope down, but the gear has to be left behind. Part of our plan for the 24 hour challenge included “bail gear”. That’s a small collection of things that we wouldn’t normally use, because if you used it, then you couldn’t bail off it in a pinch. This was litterly one nut, and a carabiner that Mike had found in the Himalayas that had been left behind when someone else had bailed.

It took us 10 seconds to rappel off of our two hours of work. That was followed by an hour of down-scrabble all the way back to our camp site, where we collapsed pretty exhausted. At this point the weather seemed to be deteriorating, and we threw in the towel on our entire 24-hour challenge. We never even tried to cross over to MacGregor slab. We did say, half-jokingly, that we would come back some day and get it right.

Aside: as I write, in March 2015, we are planning to return in July.

On the other hand, we both felt like climbing more, so we headed over to climb “Batman and Robin” over on Lumpy Ridge. (Which will be my next post.)

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24 hour challenge prep

March 12, 2015

Mike and I were planning a 24 hour climbing challenge; Basically, an attempt to keep moving (hiking from one climb to the next) and climbing for 24 hours straight.

These photos are from way back in July 2014 when I was rock climbing in Colorado with Mike Bowyer. I’m only just now getting back to going through the rest of my photographs.

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Aspen Glenn campground — where we were camping — is tucked into the trees at the base of this mountain.

Our plan was to get up before dawn (4:30 to be exact), hike the 1,500 vertical feet through the forrest (starting at about 7,000 feet above sea level mind you.) There’s no trail to the base of the climb; The plan is to just go straight from our campsite to the climb, and arrive at the base of the climb at dawn — a test of our planning and navigation in the dark. Climb the nose — that prominent line between the sunny and shady faces of the big beautiful hunk of rock. Then hike down (there’s a trail from the top that curves around the right shoulder) and back through our campsite for water and food.

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At the campsite, we’d pick up a pre-stuffed extra gear bag and hike across the valley floor. On the north side of the valley is MacGregor slab; It’s just this big ‘ol gently sloped blob of granite with about 12 different climbable lines. We planned to stash our gear bag at the base of the slab, and then start doing laps of: climb-up, and walk-off around the shoulder, all day and night. Again, there are no trails that lead to the climbing on MacGregor. It’s just a bush-wack “that way”. If everything went perfect, we hoped to get the last climb to end on the top of the slab at the next sunrise.

 

As the sun set on our day of planning, I set up my camera to take a long, time-lapse of the first thing we planned to climb the next day. This isn’t a “fade to black” at the end, it’s a “sun went down, it got pitch dark” end. (6 seconds of video.)

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Hobie poetry

March 6, 2015

Soul Sailer

Hobie Cat, Hobie Cat, where are you bound?
Silently streaking over the sound.
Your sails standing high,
Proudly contrast the sky,
It’s not just a boat;
I know it can fly!

When she gets up to speed,
She’ll sing you a song.
But if you’re weak in the knees,
You’d best not go along.
For there’s always a thrill,
And sometimes a spill!
Hobie Cat, Hobie Cat – go where you will!

–

The world that we know
dwindles down to size
on the shoreline behind us.
We sail along on the song that
is the wind.

~ Bruce W. Constantine

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only piece of poetry my father wrote. Whatever possessed him to pick up a pencil and write this, I’ll never know. However, I would bet that it was the result of long hours chatting with one of his sailing buddies until they had it down pat; Followed by him writing it out. I see no errors or erasures, and I know his handwriting well enough to suspect that he simply wrote it out straight through. The last verse – oddly indented – looks like it was written separately, or at least later than the first two verses. I think it’s the better of the three, and I fear it might be a song lyric… but I’m not searching the ‘Net because I like the idea that he wrote it.

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