Sawing to Sawmill

I was warned by Nic that there had been an ice storm up north, and that I would want to bring a saw. So I brought a collapsable camp saw & a small hatchet....I wish I had brought a chainsaw! What we walked into was a downed-tree travesty!



Chris Hirsch and I drove up Saturday afternoon, to avoid driving the 3 and a half our trip twice in the same day. Jim Merli would meet us at the boulders on Sunday. What Chris and I walked into was enough to scare Jim & Nic into going over the top of the dome the weekend before, verses hacking through the woven, twisted entanglement of fall tree tops. Just finding the trail was made difficult by the thorough devastation of 80 percent of the trees in the forest. Either their tops were broken off, large limbs were snapped, some left hanging, or the occasional completely uprooted tree. Work was made hard with crash pads on our backs. So we eventually dropped our pads, cut through a ways, went back and picked them up, hiked to where we could go no further, set them down again and resumed work. What is normally a 25 minute hike, became a 2-something hour tour de force of sawing, hacking and pulling full sized trees off the path.....ALL the way to the boulders.

I drank almost all of my water for the day before making it there.

Chris had aspirations to work Exodus on the backside of the dome, but as is often the case, the ending was soaked. So instead he put his sights to doing Absolution, a tall problem with a few broken holds & big move at the end. Well, big for anyone of a normal size.
I was on top of the boulder, cutting down the remains of a tree that was broken and hanging off the top, when I heard a smack on the rock behind me. Then Chris' head popped up. "Hey! Did you just do it?" I asked, being completely surprised by his hand & face. "Nah" He said topping out.



Nic had put up a new variation of this problem last weekend, starting from the right arete. Chris put that one down quickly too.


"Hey, has anyone done just the arete?" He asked...."No, I don't think so. You should! That would really piss off Nic!" Chris cleaned the line as he climbed it, pulling out a large chunk of rock from a seam halfway up, brushing out pockets & blowing off holds as he went.

After a couple tries he topped it out, naming it Dic Oblowjoba, after someone very special.

After that Chris started looking at possible lines going up the backside of the large boulder leaning onto Absolution, where The Juggernaut exits. He points out two really nice edges to start on. We scope out a couple more holds, brush them up, and then climbed the very fun new line we're calling Puffer Cheeks, after that same special guy.



It was my first FA. Yeah! As far as I can tell...the holds were all dirty, but that's not saying that it may not have already been climbed. We just don't know that it was. So I'm calling FA! FAAAA!
After that I started talking pictures of all of the boulders, to get something visual up on Mountain Project. Coming soon....
I shot all of the main area and then hiked and clear the path to the right area, with the large slab. We were on Back Slapper when we heard leaves crunching. We had heard that before and we disappointed by a squirrel....but this time it was Jim! We were starting to think he wasn't coming! He showed us a new line he put up on a boulder just below his Turnstile project. I finished shooting the area and we headed back to the main.
Jim and I threw our pads down under the Amateur boulder; me working the arete called Sticky Icky, and Jim on his insane sit start to his insane problem Amateur. Jim has only been climbing about a month since his (almost) 2 year hiatus away from climbing, and the bastard is just as close to doing the line as he was before!



I was feeling surprisingly strong as well, considering I spent the morning sawing trees.


I got to the sloping lip of Sticky Icky with only a few tries, only to find the sun staring me straight in the face!




Chris was nice enough to go up on top of the boulder and hold a pad in front of it as I worked it.
I had always been told that the hard part of that problem is the heel hook at the start. This has never been a problem for me, so I naively thought it would be over quick. Not so quick. Even with Chris blocking the sun for me, the top out if really hard! With no good right foot and the rock under angling away quickly, I pushed and humped and rolled off the top several times until my wrists were raw. Top-out shmop-out! Next time I'll nail it for sure.

The rest of the day I shot pictures of Jim on his line, a very satisfying thing in itself.














But after his fingers couldn't take the tiny holds anymore he sat down under Sticky Icky, "I wanna climb something today!"
To my inner delight he flailed a bit. He's always walking up my projects, so it felt good to see him having trouble on one of them. Sorry Jim! Finally he asked for my beta and sent it, but not before hanging out and humping the top out a bit too. I'm glad it's not just me! That top IS hard, Jim said so!

Between Frost & Melt Water

On a beautiful saturday @ 36 some degrees, Chris(Hirsch), Eric, Neil, Trinh & I went, um, sightseeing I guess.

We had aspirations to climb on some rock that is only workable when the St. Croix river is frozen. We started in Franconia, just down stream from Taylors Falls. Damn I want to buy that Scandinavian Chalete! What a cute collection of houses in that little glen. We hiked down the river, well frozen over, with about 6" of good snow, (as in NO slush). The wall which held the cave we were headed to came into view after a short 5 minute hike. The small nook in the bottom right of the wall is the "cave".




Josh Helke is supposedly the first ascender of the problem that works from the back of the cave straight out the edge of the roof.



Nic O(god I'm gonna spell this wrong) Oklobzija(?) did another line starting under the roof, going out & up the wall, dropping off at the first large jug you encounter. Josh's goes @ about a 7, and Nic's at a 9. I'm not sure of the names of these lines, so someone help me out here...




You'll notice the while frost all over the underside of the roof. Beneath the cave was an unexpected pool of about 2" of water. Damn! "Drink up everyone!" I exclaimed, until someone pointed out the several dead bats frozen into the ice.



We studied the lines. I hiked around a bit, hoping to scope out something else, but didn't find a thing. Chris & I were both psyched about a crack starting to the right of the cave & swirving up above it. I might have put on a harness, had we come equiped for that sort of thing.

Directly across the river is another great face at the edge of the river. This one Chris & Alex visited last summer by kayak before she headed off to Colorado. Today it was grey & supremely contrasted by the frost over the entire wall. You could make out every micro crimp & feature on it. But again, no climbing today.



The water is apparently pretty deep right in the "drop zone" of the cliff face, so we've put it off until summer, when we can return with a depth finder & really check it out. There is usually a sand bar right in the middle of the river across from it, so you could swim to the wall & climb it barefoot. We also began invisioning a Huck Finn style raft covered in pads, to paddle around to these walls. Kris, um, you're supposedly building this for us.

We headed back to the car, encountering some snow-shoers who of course inquired about "those things on our back". We drove to Taylors falls to walk the river there. Again, a lot of fun looking lines in a not so climbable state. I walked up stream, almost to the bridge, to scope a line I look at everytime I cross the river to Wisconsin. Very often the landing zone is under water, and I've never seen ANYONE climbing on it, though it is supposedly in the guide book. I checked it from the top. There was a huge landing zone exposed by the low water level. Plenty of room to land AND have a crowd watching. I can't wait until fall, when the river will be low again, and frost will not cover it.



So back to the gym with us for now...baahh!