Twelve Days in the Northeast

Hi folks,

The most recent trip report is posted here on Climbing.com. I'm no poet, but I took a shot at writing a poem anyway. Because of the way the text wraps around the photos, it doesn't quite look as I submitted it, but that's OK. I really have no clue if it's any good or not. Here is the beginning to give you an idea:

Upon the passing of Hurricane Earl;
he flew in just before
we drove

Aid, AIARE, Avalanches, Oh My!

So I've been pretty productive as of late. I took a group up a mountain, I learned to rope solo. I practiced aid climbing. I took and AIARE avalanche course, and I almost got crushed with several hundred tons of ice and snow at the bottom of Mt. Pok-O-Moonshine. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of pictures. Cry me a river.About three weeks ago I was visited at work by a group of high school

Upper Tiers at Poke-O-Moonshine

Me: If I could have just one weekend when I didn't have to bushwhack, I'd be in eternal heaven."Jello": Suck it up, pussy. This is how we get there.A 6:30am wake-up call was followed by an hour's hike straight up the left side of Poke-O-Moonshine, only to be overshadowed by yet another adventure to find hardly sought after routes in places no one with any sanity ever goes. Our goal on Sunday was

Losing My Palmolive Hands - Barkeater Cliffs

This weekend's trip consisted of me, "Chuck" and "Jello" finding ways to brutalize our bodies in ways we never planned and didn't expect. Our mission was to hit Barkeater Cliffs on Saturday and Poke-O-Moonshine Sunday, if time and weather allowed. We accomplished both to varying degrees.The ride to Barkeater Cliffs from Willsboro was about an hour long in a chilly, low-hanging fog that did a nice

Poke-O-Moonshine

A lot has changed since my last post on the Adirondacks. I've been outside more than I ever have before, I'm climbing stronger than I ever have before, and I've led (inside) my first 5.11 cleanly and (outside) my first 5.10 cleanly (Lonesome Dove). I've even jumped on my highest grade outside (Hammond Organ - 5.10d), and all of this in one summer of explosive freedom. Then, two weeks ago, "Jello"

Adirondacks - Fall Trip

So I was supposed to go to Cannon this weekend, but "Jello" has car problems (bad alignment = blown tire on the way to Philly from Cathedral - bummer) and thought he needed more time to get his car fixed. He felt it was best if I drove up to the 'Dacks and hit Cannon next weekend instead, after his car got fixed. I'm OK with that, but I had tentative plans of going to the 'Dacks with other people

Adirondacks - Sunday: Rain and The Rest of the Trip

We awoke to dry skies on Sunday, and that perculated our hopes enough that we felt we stood a good chance of beating the weather and getting a good, day-two of climbing in. The desired destination was Washbowl Cliff in Keene Valley, which was essentially across the street from where we parked the day before at Beer Walls.Screw it, there's just too damn much to write. It rained. We climbed a bit

Adirondacks - Saturday: Part Four: Midnight Bouldering

There's always one in every group. It's not a bad thing. In fact, it can be a good thing, but it is always both predictable and unpredictable at the same time: extra energy in youth will always have to find a way out of the body and into some adventure that makes one scratch his head. "Jello" is "that guy" in our group.He got his nickname by wearing a Dead Kennedy's shirt to the gym (Jello Biafra

Adirondacks - Saturday: Part Three: Ski Jumping and How It Relates To Climbing

Not every trip of mine is feted through an obsession of some sort, but this trip did have one element that caught my fascination more than climbing itself: ski jumping.As I noted on Friday's post, I was driving to "Jello"'s when I came around a corner and saw these tall, dark structures rising above the trees and towering into the dark, late-night sky. My first reaction to these "things" was, "

Adirondacks - Saturday: Beer Walls - Part Two: Still Getting There and Then the Climbing

Now, I'm not going to point fingers here, because really, it isn't any one person's fault. No one had been climbing at Beer Walls, not even "Jello", but because he lived in the area, albeit for only a couple of months, and because he had been reading the guidebook dutifully since we left the house that morning, the task of getting us to the crag, which ever one that may have been, was given to "

Adirondacks - Saturday: Beer Walls - Part One: Getting There

I awoke to "Jello" knocking on my door - a knobless piece of wood on hinges that served better as a deterrent to light than sound - and the smell of cheap pancakes sizzling on the stove in the kitchen next door. It was seven in the morning and I was as hungry as surprisingly well-rested. I don't sleep well when I'm not in my own bed. That's why I prefer staying in an actual bed over camping. If

Adirondacks - Friday: The Drive Up

Wow. My first climbing trip in a few years. The last time I went was maybe in 2002 when I went with the now defunct Weclimbs climbing group to the Gunks (as an aside - the MassClimbers group has gobbled up two entire climbing groups: Weclimbs and the MetroRock Google group. The takeovers havent been entirely successful, as only a handful of of people from each group