Open Season

In the fading light of yet another day we walked down the drying dirt path, surrounded by transforming green.  Moss drenched limbs of big leaf maples cracked and weaved through the panoply of our view and the vanilla cream of the baby blue sky now turned a rosy hue as it died behind the curtain of the horizon.  The weight of my pack was unnoticeable as I gazed over my shoulder at the disappearing memory of the day’s events.  The air was crisp and clean, and it made me feel buoyant in a way, energized, renewed.  It breathes life into an otherwise humid and decomposing environment.  This season, Autumnal in all of its glory, is my favorite.  It is both simultaneously inviting and repelling.  It awakens and sedates.  The burst of cold clarity that comes with the shadows of this time of year is also met with a kind of warmth that is different from the heavy dragging heat of the summer. 

This past weekend was really the first true weekend of the Fall.  Climbing temps could not be any better.  While we were bundled up on the ledge, waiting our turn, the climbers who were engaged in battle were shedding layers quickly and commenting on how good everything felt.  This is the time of year we spend all summer forgetting about and secretly training for.  When it finally arrives crazy unexpected breakthroughs happen, and projects get sent.  It was no different this past weekend, a sort of opening weekend in a sense.  I declare an open season on projects at World Wall.  I haven’t seen Californicator, Propaganda, and Technorigine get gang banged so hard, probably ever.  Nothing super hard to report, but a lot of breakthroughs. 

For me personally, I made a highpoint on my project Pornstar, and then in the same burn, after a couple of hangs, I sent the crux which I have never been able to do.  Sending temps indeed.  I have now completed all of the moves on Pornstar.  So psyched!  It will take a while before it’s primed for good sending burns (or rather I’m primed) but I’ve got nothing but time.  Enigma is also getting worked over pretty hard.  Justin and Kevin have been putting the screws to this masterpiece and just yesterday Kevin completed about 65-70% of the route on link falling just short of the ‘enigma’ move.  When he came down from his burn I turned to him and said, “This past year has been all about breaking through barriers and tearing down walls.  Things that have classically been deemed ‘too hard to try’ or ‘out of our pay grade’ have now been put on the project list, and some serious links have been made.”  Kevin is blazing some pretty impactful trails lately, he also stuck one of the crux moves on the Whore of Babylon, has been repeating Flatliner consistently and easily and also working Lost Horizons and has also done all of the moves on Pornstar and has made significant links on that route as well.  He’s basically opened four projects from .13d to .14b for himself.  Not bad.  Not a weekend has gone by lately where I haven’t seen someone sending their project, whether it’s been Techno, Californicator, Propaganda, or Psychosomatic (the Quartet as I call it).  And just the other day we saw some old Spanish dude fall just short of onsighting Technorigine after questing super hard through it’s powerful and technical cruxes.  Very inspiring. 

As the sun dances its way up the black and tan rhino rock the hordes of wasps (the fallout from a particularly bad winter) chase its warmth higher and higher until it disappears entirely and they retreat to their enclaves.  I warmed up on Techno, it was gloriously bathed in sunlight, and as I approached the final sequence I glanced up and noticed 7-8 wasps darting in out of the cracks and crevices that make up the final holds.  As they swirled around my head and legs I opted out of a WWE-esque smackdown with the hymenopteran horde and plunged into the shade escaping any kind of venomous retribution. 

I made it home late Sunday evening.  As I drove west on I-90 I noticed several groups of people standing on the overpasses that lace through the streamlined interstate.  They were all looking east and as I drove home in a somewhat sedated fashion I thought nothing of it.  I pulled up to my house and stepped out of the car, approaching the front door with my arms full and my backpack sagging off one shoulder.  I heard the voice of my roommate, his room located on the second story, his window just above the front stoop of our house.  “Hey man, check out the moon.”  I swiveled and swirled in the middle of the street straining to see something amazing.  “Look east.” He said.  I turned my gaze east, and faintly, just barely there, I could make out the outline of a dim shadow of where the moon should be.  It was as if a strong merlot had been dumped on the satin surface of the moon and it now sported a darkening black eye of liquid red amber.  Later that night, deep in sleep, I had a dream within a dream.  My first dream was a stressful ordeal, I had been awakened by something other than my alarm but to my total disbelief it was already 10:00 in the morning and well past when I usually get to the office.  I remember a feeling of overwhelming discontent and unease.  I eventually snapped awake, but inside of another dream.  I was in my old house in Colorado where I had lived as a pre-teen and teen.  I don’t remember the details very well but I eventually sat in a stairwell, my knees up to my chest and my arms hugging them, and started to cry.  Uncontrollably, a great oppressive feeling of sadness permeated this dream.  I did eventually wake up, in real time.  My alarm had not gone off for some reason even though my phone was telling me that I had set it.  Bizarrely, I had woken up one minute after it was supposed to go off.