Salt Lake City, September 23-28, 2004

This September I had planned a trip to Salt Lake City before school started, to visit friends from when I lived there (doing my Masters at the University of Utah) and also do some climbing.  As luck would have it, I pulled a tendon two weeks before the trip, so that ruled out any hard climbing, but by the time the trip rolled around my finger felt like it had recovered enough to do some easier stuff.

I arrived on Thursday afternoon, and my friend Chris picked me up at the airport.  After dropping off stuff at his place, we headed up Little Cottonwood Canyon to do a hike up to White Pine Lake.  The hike was fun, and the canyon was beautiful with the fall colours in full swing.  Here is a photo from the hike:



The next day Chris and I decided to do some climbs, so we went up Big Cottonwood Canyon to sample some of the quartzite trad climbing.  The first route we did was a 3-pitch 5.6 called East Dihedral, it was fun.  Next we did an even better 3-pitch 5.6 called Steort's Ridge.  It is a classic climb, climbing a knife edge ridge, great views, but unfortunately we forgot the camera.

Saturday morning Chris and I drove up Little Cottonwood Canyon to meet up with Barlow, my main climbing partner from my SLC days, and his friend Matt, for some granite bouldering.  I didn't do much since I was trying to be careful of my finger I injured, but I took some photos of other people.  First, Barlow on Twisted, a classic sandbagged (I think) LCC V4.  It is technical moves up an overhanging shallow dihedral.



Here are some photos of another guy on a cool route to the right of Twisted called Manly Arete (V6).  It is super hard, evidently this guy was pretty strong.



That afternoon I met up with my non-climbing friend (Sonia) for lunch at Baja Fresh, the best restuarant in the world.  The next day Barlow and Matt picked me up from Chris's place, and the three of us headed to Joe's Valley for some killer sandstone bouldering.  This was a bitter sweet experience for me, it was awesome to be there, but it was depressing to not be able to get on hard lines.  Oh well.  We started off at Scary Monsters, a classic highball V6 with an insecure topout (hence the name).  Matt had done it before but got shut down, and Barlow came super close to sending, falling twice from the top (luckily his Cordless Evel Pad saved the day both times, it is stinkin' huge).  Here are some photos:



We did some other stuff around there, then moved on to Area 51, the home of classics such as Black Lung (V13, insane looking), Resident Evil, Phoney Baloney,and many more.  Barlow and I did a fun V4 dyno problem called Sun in my Eyes, here are pictures of Barlow sending:



Matt and Barlow worked on an awesome problem called Big Boy (V7), with Matt doing all the moves individually, and vowing to come back and link them within the next 5 years.  This is an awesome problem that I have a history with, when I was living in Utah I broke my tailbone falling off of it (mis-positioned crash pad) and couldn't climb for the better part of a year.  Here are some photos of Matt bustin' out a hot sequence:



Next we headed to an awesome dyno called Pocket Rocket.  It is graded V6, but that is if you are short, for taller people it is probably more like V4.  Here is a nice sequence of Barlow sending on his second try:



Finally we went over to an area called the closet and did a bunch of classic problems, including an amazing V4 called Pimpin' Jeans, which I am shown climbing in the photos below.  It is on these amazing sharp crimps that are almost like slits cut into the otherwise smooth rock face.  Notice my trad beard that I have been growing, it served me well on the trad climbs the previous day, and to my amazement I could even boulder with it on!



The next day Chris and I headed out for some more trad, this time on the granite in Little Cottonwood Canyon.  We started on Schoolroom West, a fun 5-pitch 5.7 on the Gate Buttress.  After that we did a good 5.8 hand crack called Bushwack Crack (only one bush in the crack midway up, not as bad the name implies).  But, we forgot the camera, so there are no pictures.  By then it was getting late, so we headed to Baja Fresh (my 4th time of the trip) for a Mexican repast.  We never started our days of climbing before 1:00, since we spent the mornings eating huge breakfasts and playing backgammon. 

The next day was the final one of my trip, I met with my advisor (Reid Harrison) from my Masters for lunch, then met up with Barlow and another friend in the afternoon, then back to Chris's place to thump him one more time in backgammon (har har, actually Chris did most of the thumping in our backgammon matches).  Chris dropped me off at the airport at 8:30, and my travel nightmare back to Seattle began.  I flew to Las Vegas, then waited for almost 2 hours for my connection to Seattle, which left around midnight, we got Seattle around 2:30am but it was too foggy to land, so we landed in Portland instead, around 3:30am, then waited until around 5:00am for a chartered bus which drove us to Seattle, finally arriving around 9:00am, for a full 12 hours of travel for what could have been a less than 2 hour direct flight.  What a nightmare.  Oh well, all in all a super fun trip, and I'll do it again next year, hopefully injury free.