disjoint thoughts

Today I bring you the Wenny Awards. The annual Wenny Awards are given out to climbs I’ve done in the past year. The categories change every year, and the criteria for judging is completely biased. Without further ado, I give you the winners:

Most devious crux: Kor-Ingalls
I didn’t know I was at the crux until I was in the air!

Worst approach: Snake Dike
Most run-out: Snake Dike
Only route I bailed off of: Snake Dike
No… I didn’t bail off of it because of the runout. After going through that horrible hike, and climbing five pitches of pretty boring runout climbing it started to rain on us

Biggest shit your pants move: North Face/West Crack of Oak Creek Spire
The five plus foot jump across the void from the summit of the lower spire onto the wall of taller spire has to be the scariest single moment of my climbing career.

Scariest pitch: pitch 4 of Stolen Chimney
This was some intense exposure with a crazy summit.

Most hilarious: Community Pillar
I didn’t know climbing could be so funny!

Best crack: The Prow
This is a super cool route with neat face-climbing-like movement. I’ve only TR’ed it, but I want to go back and try for a send!

Most surprising flash: The Bat Cave
Super cool problem with TONS of pockets. It’s a miracle that I hit the right pockets on my first try.

Most uncomfortable seat: Traitor Horn
It looked good from the belay, but when you get up there it’s like trying to sit on a greased pig.

Worst rock: Rink-Kudo
Yeh, super shitty rock. Thought I was going to die. You can read more about it here.

Most mosquitos: Matthes Crest
The mosquitoes were really on the approach… the long, long, long approach. They came in SWARMS! Seriously, reapplying bug repellent kept them off your skin, but they just hovered around you. Blood thirsty little bastards!

Most proud to send: Regular Route of Higher Cathedral Spire
Total Valley test piece! Cool face climbing moves with super exposed climbing… my kinda climb.

… and last but not least …

Most phallic spire: Totem Pole
This erect piece of rock was hard! There was lots of sweating and grunting that left me tired as a dog.

Fridays working at OpenRain are awesome! Let me break it down for yall.

First off on Friday everyone gets free lunch. Who doesn’t like free lunch? We all take a quick poll of what people want to eat and we order delivery!

Secondly, every other week we take our food into the conference room and watch various tech videos from conferences, postcasts or whatever. I think this week we’re going to watch a couple of Merb videos.

Thirdly, alternating with the weeks where we watch videos, we talk about everything we’ve done in the past two weeks. We talk about what we’ve done wrong, what we’ve done right, how we’re going to improve, and who’s going to do what to make things better. We talk about client projects, OpenRain projects, personal projects, goals, dreams, and everything that’s on our minds. If you’re a scrum person, these are basically sprint reviews for us.

Finally, once the work day is over, there’s a fridge full of various beers to start happy hour off right at the office.

Last Sunday Erin, Jason, Sav and I took a trip out to Queen Creek. It was cold as shit and with a 40% chance of rain; we just prayed we wouldn’t end up heading home wet and cold without getting any climbing in.

We decided to try a new place in Upper Devil’s Canyon called The Beach. Marty’s little guide to Upper Devil’s did a good job of leading us there without too much trouble. The Beach itself is a relatively small area with climbs ranging from 5.9 to 5.13. The crag is approached from the top, so it makes it easy to setup top ropes on some of these stiff routes.

We ended up climbing a couple of 10s, a couple of 11s (one which was uber classic dihedral/face/arete that I want to go back and send), and a 12 (overhanging arete with a crap start but decent climbing the rest of the way).

Despite being super cold and actually getting snowed on a little, it was a good time. The Beach has a couple of good climbs, and is great if you just want to top rope climbs in the 10+ to 12 range.

Check out the rest of the pics from the trip here. Pictures taken by Erin and Sav… yeh, I lugged my big camera all the way down there and didn’t take any pictures myself!

Dear Apple,
Thank you for releasing a super cool new ipod nano. It looks and feels super sweet. I just have one question: why the fuck did you have to change the way it charges? You have just made your new ipod incompatible with the huge collection of ipod accessories currently on the market. You should have packaged it with a jar a vaseline to ease the pain of the ass raping.
Love, Ben

So it turns out that the new 4th generation iPod Nano changed the way it charges. I’m not exactly sure how, but according to the apple forums it’s something to do with “12V Firewire and 5V USB charging change of spec” and is not something that will be fixed via a simple software upgrade. If you’re in the same boat as me and are looking for a less anal-rape-version of repurchasing all your accessories that no longer work, check out the Scosche Charging Adapter. Now, I haven’t actually tested this thing out yet… I just ordered it. For 30 bucks I’m definitely giving it a shot, because I’m not gay.

UPDATE: It works! The only real complaint I have about it is it makes the iPod stick way out of the dock for iPod speaker systems. I’m a little worried it’ll get bumped and something will snap off.

My brother is HILARIOUS. He just posted this on craigslist. I’ve copied and pasted its entirety here for your enjoyment:

I have your sock - m4w - 21 (Virginia beach )
Reply to: pers-959033780@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-12-15, 3:16PM EST

I had just drove home for a quick bite to each while my laundry was In the drier at the local laundry mat. To my surprize when I returned 30 minutes latter my mix of whites and darks were not dry and hot to the touch.

This was very odd to me since I have laundry down to a science. never has the large style drier failed to leave my weekly laundry dry and almost to hot to touch after 30 minutes. No worries though it was dry enough and I had things to do.

As I unloaded the drier I was shocked to find your colorfull sock in with my mix of laundry. Now I know it was not in the drier before as I check these thing ever since i ruined all my white shirts when they got dried with chap stick.

It all makes sense now why my weekly wash was not as dry as it should have been. I’m guessing you threw your laundy in with mine and while removing it the lone sock got left behind. I don’t blame you for putting your wash in with mine. I’m sure you were impressed with the handfull of drier sheets I had thrown In there.

After showing the sock to many of my friends, yes I currently have the missing sock in my pocket. I come to relize that you are female and must have cute small feet. I also know as I’m sure you do having a missing sock is just a pain. A colorfull sock like this can not be paired up with any run of the mill white sock.

Maybe you thought I was cute and left the sock behind so we could someday meet ? Maybe you want a friend to do laundy with ? Whatever the case may be I would love to buy you dinner and return your missing sock.

You’re a riot Jason. Hope you get that sock back to its owner.

On Saturday I participated in ABS 10 at Climbmax gym.

There was a pretty decent turnout. The competitors were 90% kids… who climb stronger than I.

Overall, Mike put together a good comp.

The only gripe I had was the total lack of swag. They raffled off ONE pair of shoes, threw out maybe four ABS shirts, and gave out crappy little ribbons to almost everyone. This is the least amount of shit I’ve seen given out at any comp I’ve been to. Hell, I went to Climbmax’s showing of the Reel Rock Film tour a month or so ago and they had LOADS of stuff raffled off. Now they have a comp and can’t find anything except a pair of shoes to give out?

Ohh well, it was a good comp and I had fun anyway.

So… how did I do? I placed 1st in the intermediate category. 1st is great and all, but with intermediate I feel like I just won the special olympics. I signed up for intermediate because I didn’t think I would be climbing very strong. Lack of training and overall climbing time lately has my endurance down for harder routes.

Now Tim, I know you’re going to accuse me of sandbagging my way through this comp and I ASSURE you that isn’t the case. I actually thought if I climbed two advanced problems I would get bumped up. Turns out you need three advanced problems.

Check out the rest of my pictures from the comp.

A couple of weekends ago Nick, the owner of Klime Clothing, invited a bunch of people to go climbing out at The Mine in Queen Creek. I tagged along to do some climbing as well as shoot photos for his new line of Klime clothes.

I ended up sending a sweet little 11a called Camper Van Beethoven. I followed someone else up this route probably a year ago and thought it was super scary, but I didn’t have much trouble this time once I convinced myself to stop being a pussy and commit.

The pictures turned out pretty good. I think I did a good job at showing off Klime and really focusing on the clothes rather than the person.

Nick a cool dude. He’s always getting groups of peeps together to go climb. I think this weekend they made a trip out to Lemmon.

After getting rained out at Red Rocks, Erin and I decided to get at least one day of climbing in. We picked a Superstition multipitch route that neither of us had done: Rink-Kudo.

So for people who don’t like to read, here’s how this blog post ends: don’t do this route.

The approach isn’t too bad, it’s pretty hard to get lost and the hike isn’t too hard.

Pitch 1 is decent. The crux is down low where you need to traverse between two cracks. I’m not very flexible and found myself crying out in pain as I tried to do a stem move. Other than that it was a good pitch. Not much lose rock. Good pro. Fun movements.

Pitch 2 is adventurous, at least if you climb it the way I did. I started up a crack that had at least 2 big bushes growing out of it. I guess I should have scoped out the pitch a little better before heading up. The rock was good, climbing was ok, pro was good. There’s a little tunnel at the end of the pitch that’s really kind of a disappointment. It’s more of a hole you step through.

Pitch 3 is where the shit starts to hit the fan. You start off by traversing left to reach the base of a chimney. You can place the shitty pro at the bottom of the chimney in mud cracks and lose flakes, but why bother. Once you’re tired of fiddling with pro, you fire up into the unknown of the chimney above. That unknown chimney is crappy. This chimney makes Ancient Art seem like granite. Lose, SHARP, rock is everywhere. Luckily your belayer is mostly out of harms way since the start of the pitch is a traverse, otherwise I’d rate this pitch an X for your second. The pro is ok, you just have to find it.

Pitch 4 is only for suckers who didn’t have enough of this route on pitch 3. If there were fixed anchors at the top of pitch 3, I would have considered bailing. This pitch is pretty much face climbing. It would be great if the rock wasn’t deceivingly crappy and the pro almost non-existent and equally crappy. In the 180 feet of climbing on this pitch, there were maybe two pieces of pro that I thought would would have held a fall. I had several hold break off on me, making the climbing extremely insecure. I was unable to trust my pro, and unable to trust the holds that I was climbing on. This was the worst pitch of climbing I’ve done. To add insult to injury, the summit has only one spinning bolt. You can back it up for your second with a suspect #3 tricam placement and a #1 bd nut.

The decent isn’t bad, but bring some extra webbing as you’ll probably need to replace some old shit… I don’t think this route sees many ascents.

I can’t recommend this climb to anyone. If you do it, just be careful and be ready for some insecure climbing. As for me, I’ve had my share of Superstition choss for awhile.

This Saturday Climbmax is hosting an ABS comp!

On a side note… how do people stay updated with what comps are coming up? I would say about half the time I hear about them via word of mouth. The other half is posters at the local gyms. Even then, I seem to miss a comp every now and then.

The local gym websites do a pretty shitty job of keeping people updated. Most of them don’t have a mailing list, or post new news in a blog like format (with a sexy rss feed). So unless I just happen to visit their site for shits and giggles I never hear about comps from their website.

Sometime people post local comps on various forums, but it’s pretty hit or miss. I think some of the bigger comps have mailing lists, but that never covers small local comps. I wish there was a single mailing list, rss feed, google group or something that I could use to stay informed about comps in my area.

David: “Where are going for Thanksgiving? Are you going to J-Tree?”
Me: “I want to go to Red Rocks!”

Out of all the places I’ve climbed, Red Rocks in Nevada, has me the most excited for a return trip. The steer number of long, high quality, multipitch trad routes within my level is amazing.

We planned out a five day climbing trip over Thanksgiving and hit the road. Unfortunately after two crappy days of rain and hanging out at the campground, we decided cut our loses and head back to Arizona. Damn you rain! Until next time Red Rocks…