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It's Bishop Season! Or that's what every local boulderer in California will start saying around this time of the year. What's Bishop season you may ask? Why, it's the most wonderful time of the year! Bishop Season tis the season to be jolly. When Bishop Clause gives you gifts in the form of sent projects and perfect sending temperatures. Oh Come all ye, Bishop-ers.
Read MoreIt's funny when you plan out a backpacking trip, you search the internet for details to make an overall plan and trip itinerary. You get your daily mileage and ascent all scheduled out, and you start to think that only bad weather can throw a wrench in your plan. However, over time, I've learned that I should always anticipate about +/- 5 extra miles to what I read online. That was definitely the case with this trail from Lyell Canyon to Devil's Postpile. All my research (reading online trip reports) led me to believe this trail would be about 31 miles and only 4,100 feet of total gain, and so that seemed like an easy 10 miles per day trip. We were slightly surprised when we found that the trail was actually about 38 miles and 5,000' of gain, and had to make up some extra miles in day 2 and day 3. It still was an excellent trip, and very doable in 3 days.
Read MoreVirgin Gorda is located in the British Virgin Islands, and it happens to be home to hundreds of beautiful granite boulders. The quality of climbing is fantastic, and the location is unreal. If you're looking to combing a climbing trip into a relaxing beach vacation, this is the best of both worlds.
Read MoreWhen I told people I was going to South Africa, many people asked me about which cities (Johannesburg/Cape Town) we would be going to, and if we had plans to go do a safari. All valid questions, and although I did have hopes to see Cape Town and possibly go on a safari, the objective for this vacation was to get a taste of world class Bouldering.
Read MoreMy friend, Ashima, and I decided in 2017 we would try to hike at least one peak together a month this year (starting in February). I am going a little out of order here because we did a peak in February, but this blog post is about our recent hike in the San Gabriel Mountains on a route called Bastards Ridge. It's been snowing like crazy everywhere in California, so we've generally been avoiding the Sierras. This has left us mostly with lower elevation peaks near the coast.
Read MoreThis new interest in sailing is about a year in the making now. It was around May/June of 2015 when Michael and I were binge watching Sailing You-tube channels and Sailing Documentaries on Netflix and we decided to take an "Intro to Sailing Course" down in LA, just to see if we'd like it. In good fashion, we took our groupon down to a local sailing group and went on our first intro sail. We really dug it but realized we had no idea what we were doing. So we signed up for a week long live-aboard sailing course to get certified ASA 101, 103 and 104 (which I never wrote a post about sadly.. maybe I will one of these days) in Mexico for the end of 2015.
Read MoreI want to tell you guys about my favorite climb I've done so far this year! Two weekends ago Michael and I headed off to Mammoth Lakes, CA to go climb the alpine route North Arete at Crystal Crag. This was one of my goal climbs for the year, because I've been reading it would be a good intro climb into Alpine Climbing, and I love, love, loved it! Besides the fact that we were the only people on the climb the day we went out and we had perfect weather, this climb was that perfect mix of long but easy fun (rated 5.6)... and the views were fantastic!
Read MoreIt was going to be a mountaineering-in-Utah kind of weekend, but last minute (after looking at the weather conditions and understanding the mountain we were headed to may be more of a hike than snow mountaineering) we opted to stay local, and go climbing with some friends in The Needles instead.
Read MoreIt's been a really long time since I've posted something. It's not because we haven't been out there doing our thing. In May we took our first sailing lessons at Redondo Beach, CA, we went bouldering at a place called Wagon Wheel in California, hiked the Jar trail several times, and went mountain biking at Wind Wolves Preserve. I meant to (and still plan to) write up a post on the Jar Trail and the mountain biking trail at Wind Wolves, but its just been a pretty hectic month (mixed in with a little bit of laziness on the weekdays).
Read MoreI bet you were thinking I'd have given up on my training experiment by now (using the methods and program described by the book Training for the New Alpinism). Although I missed a couple of planned days here and there, I mostly stuck to my 8 week transition period plan. Woo hoo! And shame on you for not believing in me.
Read MoreI’m finding that, more often than not, things do not always go according to plan. Plans formulate, chaos intervenes and then the plans change. This isn’t always a bad thing though; sometimes I enjoy how things turn out differently than planned.
Read MoreNot all who suffer do so unwillingly. In fact, last weekend I spent 14 hours with about 20 or so people who chose to spend their Saturday's doing that exact thing. Suffering. The Utah Climbing Club. The group of people I look forward to seeing once a month to suffer with somewhere on a mountain in pursuit of summits. Summits that don't necessarily mean much to anyone except for ourselves, and they only mean so much to us because of the hard work and sweat we put into achieving them.
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