SHADOWS AND LIES: Two dudes, two hours, a choss pile, and a lot of photoshop

I’m a lucky guy and happen to have a crag near my house that is accessible year-round that takes me less than half an hour from door to base. Pretty sweet I know. And the crag… short bold lines similar to Stanage Edge (except for the dozen or so bolts we put in) and rock similar to El Capitan (ok that is a stretch but probably on that big hunk of rock there is something similar). So I’m living the dream, it’s Christmas Eve and my nephew comes over and says “let’s go climb”. Sweet, we’re on it and head for the river district at the crack of 2pm and rope up at 2:30. We have about 2 hours of light, way more than we need. 50% of the crag is still dripping from the “storm of the decade” but there is always some dry rock.

I head up “Sketch Book” 5.7 and enjoy the moist jams and then bask in the warm sun (pretty warm for Dec. 24 anyway) on the upper headwall (which is kinda like El Cap’s only smaller and not as head-wally).

Then my nephew follows it, jammin’ the “crack of doom” and then carefully styles around the “hollow man flake” into the “punch bowl” and eventually the steep “river wall headwall”. Ok so it’s only 40’ of climbing, and that is a lot of “names” for only 40 feet of rock, but we take our crag seriously (a crag nobody knows about except you now maybe and a few others).

The shadows loom (not really, that’s photoshop but the base was full of our crap so this is my answer to that! Plus it looks like those cool pro pics of guys climbing El Cap and the sun is setting and the wall is filling up with shadows).

I greet and congratulate my nephew at the “cave belay” .

We set up a natural gear anchor (like the ones on El Cap) and then rap into the shadows (the real ones).

I stick my camera into a hole and try and make it really look like a “cave belay” because that would be really cool, cooler than the sloping belay we’re really on, click one off before rapping down for another trad line.

So I start up “Happy to See Me” 5.8, kind of a trad line except for all the bolts and lack of natural gear. It’s really good though.

Coby, my nephew, sends it in style. (look closely at the bottom center of the photo and you’ll see two sets of “boobs” (more on that one coming up).

Coby crimpin and pimpin’ his way to the “cave belay”.

So then I decide to solo “Boobs” (with a rope though) and kinda get stuck in a dirty old man kinda way and find it hard (cough) to continue, but eventually do.

Here is a close up (sorta scary now that I see it close up). OK stop staring, move along... perv.

Our expedition is sponsored by “Dasani” water, but they only gave us one bottle and we had to pay for it, and share it. Thank you Dasani!

We do a couple more solos (with ropes), and after we add it all up we find we did a 160’ of climbing, not bad, not bad…

We zip on home to the coast and right back into the groove of teaching the next generation to be hardmen/hardwomen like us (snort)!

Merry Christmas everyone, hope you enjoyed this and that in some small way you could relate to such a grand epic adventure. -Tom