The Smith Oblivion Times Part 3

And you thought it was over?  Ha!  I’m dragging this epic trip out for as long as I have digital media to post.  Well, actually its not my digital media, but we can pretend.  So…things progressed at a pretty steady rate throughout the week.  At one point we had about fifteen Oly heads all congregating around our small and rather crowded picnic table, which at one point had like five stoves, eight guide books, seven coolers, nine fold up camping chairs, and a colorful assortment of half empty or almost empty cardboard cases of beer.  Oh the good life.  We would emerge from our nylon caves only to see if it would be a hacky-sack-kind-of-morning or a balls-to-the-wall-all-out-crush-fest type of ordeal.  We got pretty lucky with the consistently bad weather and climbed every day.  Only once did we get rained out on a balmy looking morning only to retreat to Bend where we got smashed and ended up coming back to Smith and having an impromptu climbing sesh…tipsy.  The days (pub)crawled by with the kind of carefree nonchalance a cat has when judging you from across the room all the while licking itself and thinking where it can have a nap next.  The highlights of the trip might be meeting a few French Canadians who forced us to drink a whole half gallon of Captains and then disappearing without a trace as if they had been part of some drug induced hallucination.  Or maybe crashing the tent of a climbing guide service that bussed in twenty or so ‘inner-city’ youths only to have them scamper up the Rope-De-Death-Bloc in the rain the next morning, our stamped out spliff stubs still smoldering in the floor of their mess tent.  Maybe it was the non-stop Ondra impressions, or the train we all ran on Toxic, or the pockets, the crimps, the yelling, the sending, the failures and successes, the cold nights, the hot days, the inside jokes about Arnold Schwarzenegger, or the guy who told us to stop our dog from eating the food he refused to keep away from the dirt floor of the campground, the pokemon references, or the massive amount of interchangeable campground companions that came and went like the seasons in fast forward.  It was probably all of the above.