Time is Sacred

The fleeting moments of time.  Kind of surreal and intangible, yet so vivid when you actually live in and for those moments of clarity.  I have one week left before moving, first a quick stop in Washington to say hello to my family, then a long drive through Canada to find solace in a harbor where I will board a ferry that will take me the rest of my journey's length.  Destination: a job in Haines, Alaska working for Alaska Mountain Guides as a sea kayak guide leading day trips. 

 

The lodge I worked for, or more accurately the ski school program at the lodge I worked for is now closed for the season and instead of pursuing employment at one of the other three lodges here at mammoth I decided to enjoy my last 10 days here in Bishop.  Cue snow storm and amazing cold weather that has provided an incredible two days of good snow conditions on the mountain. 

 

Above my good friend Preston rips a line down one of the Avy Chutes at Mammoth mountain in a nice cache of powder.

Where did he go?? 

 

I was slowly gaining some good momentum in the climbing realm when I decided to take five days off and go skiing everyday!  I'm also gearing up for an ascent of Mt. Humphreys a 14,000 foot peak that will require some trad climbing and then a ski descent.  Pretty excited.  Unfortunately the downside of taking so much time off from bouldering has left me with weak fingers and soft skin.  But I did manage to get out to a new'ish sector right smack dab in the middle of the tablelands.  The Sacreds!  I was lucky enough to have a guided tour of the area with none other than one of its developers Josh Vale. 

 

Josh sending a sweet V.5 as part of our 'secondary' warm up.  It was really hot yesterday and the motivation to try hard was low.  However I was just psyched to be visiting a new area where every problem I got on was new.  The Sacreds are quite a sight to behold.  I felt as if I had left Bishop and gone on a road trip yet everything resembled the Sads and Happys.  What an amazing place this is.  The Sacreds are really a perfect combination of the Happys and Sads with all of the grandeur and openness of the large well spaced blocks of the Happys with a large dash of the jumbled chaotic enclosed caves and dwellings of the Sads. 

 

Josh showed me all of the well developed problems and all of them are so unique and exciting in their own way.  There is a problem back in this canyon called The Rose that I didn't have a chance to get on but the reason it is called the Rose is because of the bright red boulder it's located on.  Crazy!  The canyon is strewn with large blocks and oddball lowballs and mind blowing roofs that you don't really find anywhere else.  The most impressive roof I saw was the March of Pigs roof that is really a TRUE roof.  There were also some incredible arêtes and one pretty sweet lip traverse, as well as a ton of warm up spots, low angled slab climbs, and one highball crack climb! 

Now, I'm hyping this place up a lot, and its because I've been craving new boulders, but in all reality its a lot smaller than I let on, with a lot of development yet to happen but really a lot of development that has already happened with several of the choice lines chalked and done. 

 

The 'up' variation of the problem above will be a classic hard crimp line on perfect rock (once the top out is cleaned). 

 

This was the highlight of the day for me, an enormous twenty foot roof that had some very fluid movement straight out of the bottom, literally a lie down start for me, and then a short powerful crux right at the lip with an odd yet fun top out.  This was a spectacular example of what the Sacreds has to offer and I was psyched to have climbed it. It starts down where that long yellow pad is and climbs out on essentially jugs to a really neat sequence that I am just getting into in the picture above. 

The Sacreds are a great spot, just don't come there looking for FA's that will put your name on the map of international climbing prowess.  It was quite refreshing to walk through a canyon of large boulders that had seen very little traffic; there wasn't a massive amount of dog crap, toilet paper, trash, and boot rubber everywhere and the sense of isolation I felt was a nice change.