Welcome to Winter

 

It was another Black Mountain weekend. On Saturday I met up with Ian and Bridget at the boulders near group site 4/5. We had a good day climbing a lot of moderates, most have probably been done before but there may have been an FA mixed in. It’s hard to tell at Black Mountain since people have been climbing here for thirty plus years. We later climbed on the Dog boulder which has an awesome V2 arete on the right side and a rad V4 face in the middle. Next we hit up the Captain’s Junk boulder which is a huge bloc with a dozen problems on it from V0 to VHard project! Most of them are high quality and tall but not too scary. If you want directions to this beast (you should, it’s awesome), contact Ian.

The weather was perfect on Saturday, sunny with temps in the 50’s. That started to change around 6PM when the temps dropped ten degrees and the wind started to pick up. By the time we got to the campsite it was in the low 40’s with huge winds! In the morning it was even colder with 40 mph winds! On Sunday it didn’t go over 45 degrees all day and we were in clouds with constant wind. Good conditions for climbing but apparently not good conditions for smurfs (they turn purple when cold)!

We started off at the OK Corral since it’s usually a little warmer down there. After warming up we hopped on Cosmos which I still hadn’t finished. After a couple of tries falling on the last move again I managed to stay on and stick the final move on my third go of the day! This one is hard to rate, it took me quite a while to do it but it felt more technical and slippery than physically difficult so it may only be V9. After the Corral, Joe took us to the Fireman’s Hat area where he showed us some cool problems and projects to finish the day on (Thanks Joe!).

So what was the point of this post? To show you the picture below. My first diagonal split! I sliced it at some point on Saturday and it finally split open when I sent Cosmos.