Catching Up.....

So, its been a while since my last post but I wanted to get back in the swing of things. Over the last few months I did a good bit of climbing, down at the New, the Red and I took a trip to Yosemite Valley which was pretty awesome. I also moved....

So the trips to the New have been pretty standard, sent some cool climbs and still have a lot of open projects. But the most exciting trip was to Yosemite. I met up with my buddy Apl, the first week of October and we had a great trip. The first day we tried to climb the Nose on El Capitan but regrettably had to bail.

After that we took a few days just cragging, bouldering and hangin around camp 4. Then we decided to attempt a one day ascent of the Regular route on Half Dome. This really isn't a big deal but for the 2 of us who had yet to climb a grade VI wall let alone in do it in a day.

The day before our ascent attempt we hiked up the death slabs to the base of the wall, this was a long 4 hour hike with very heavy packs. Once at the base we set up our bivy, eat and go to bed in the dark. The next morning we woke up around 5am and started up the route. We were definitely moving slower then we wanted but we were making progress. Within a few pitches of the top the temp. dropped and the wind started to pickup. We topped out around 9 pm and within a half hour it started to rain/snow (kind of a wintery mix). The two of us packed our stuff up as fast as we could and started looking for the cables. It took way to long to find these cables, probably about an hour maybe a little longer. Then once we got down the cables and made it to what is called "the saddle" it took another hour to find the stairs. Normally, it shouldn't take so long to get down but the top of Half Dome was covered in a dense fog that cut visibility down to about 15 feet, not good.

Anyway, eventually we got down and back to the bivy. The next day we hiked to hikers trail and went to an all you can eat buffet. The rest of the trip was pretty relaxing and we headed home.

A few weekends later I met back up with Apl and did some climbing at the Red and Seneca. All in all it was a pretty good end of the season.

As for the rest of life, I just moved to Chicago and got a job working as an office peon moving boxes and stuff. It's a very easy and boring job but it pays ok and is going to help me save for more climbing trips.

I'll need to post more later but that is what has been going on the last few months.