Kale and Garbanzo Beans

Someone got a new haircut!

We are preparing for our Bow Valley trip and I could not be more intrigued.  We spent approximately 2 months just trying to figure out where to spend our week of vacation and since our Rifle trip fell through we set our sights on locales that were slightly closer.  The Fins were in the cards until I stumbled across the guide book for the Bow Valley.  It only took a short flip through of the colorful guide to make up my mind.  With several amazing limestone cliffs all within half an hour or so of each other and surrounded by pristine wilderness in the heart of the Canadian Rockies it was an easy choice.  I’ve spent the last month pouring over the guide and trying to formulate the best plan to make the most out of our short time there and I still don’t know exactly which crags we will end up visiting.  But I do know that we will have a great time and I am really looking forward to escaping this never ending heat wave in the PNW.

The scene here has been good lately, but not nearly as good as last year.  Maybe I suffer from the same kind of winter induced seasonal Alzheimer’s that everyone else does but I don’t think I can remember a summer that had such long lasting high temps.  I’m not unreasonable, each summer in the PNW I expect at least a couple weekends of temps in the mid 80’s to low 90’s but this Summer has been a different matter with temps in the mid 80’s to low 90’s lasting weeks instead of days and when you think the heat has evaporated and the cooler more pleasant 70 degree temps have returned the glaring warmth resurges just to remind you of how badly you crave the crispness of the Fall. 

But maybe I’m just getting old, or climbing at the wrong times or even at the wrong crags because within my small climbing community sends have been going off left and right.  I haven’t really been working anything lately.  I’ve visited Little si quite a bit in the last month, no after work sessions just on the weekends.  I’ve put some good fitness burns into Pornification and I’m fairly confident it will go down this Fall but it’s not the main motivating factor for me this year.  After sending Fight Club earlier this summer I was so exhausted with the process of repeating the same routine for one route ( a route I had arrogantly written off as in the bag after a couple sessions only to turn into a 6 week long battle) that I headed north a few times to sample new routes in Squamish and take a break from really pushing myself.  Now I find the taste of projecting quite appealing only to be faced head on with a 9 day trip to the land of Canadian limestone and the performance-wise unknown.  Ugh, sounds like I’m complaining at this point.  First world problems, right?

Between the staggering amount of new rock we will encounter in the Bow Valley, all the hiking we will have to do in order to access it, and the mental cruxing we will encounter I’m excited to step out of the routine once again to sample a new crag and add limestone to the list of rock types I have yet to but will soon climb on.  When we return the battle continues but hopefully not with the conditions.  There is still a long list of local crags (okay maybe only like two) that we still want to visit so it will be difficult deciding where to spend out fleeting weekends.  Fingers crossed for a cool and crisp Indian Summer. 

 

I have procured a new camera and lens and lately I’ve been way more motivated to snap photos of friends climbing than I have been to climb myself.  But don’t let that fool you, at the end of the day when all I have to show for my efforts is a memory card brimming with shots I always feel guilty that I didn’t get enough laps in or make some break through on the boulder crux of my new project.  That’s just how it goes some days, trading time on the rock for 25-28 likes on social media, HA!

This camera (recommended to me by a friend and amazing climbing photographer) far surpasses anything I have ever used before and I am still just flying it on auto pilot.  My plan is to get comfy with it for the next few months and then take a class at the local community college to really go in depth and expand the little knowledge I have about digital photography and editing.  So far I have had an endless amount of fun shooting with it.  All the photos on this post are from the new camera and none of them (I am sad to say) have been edited, but I picked the ones I liked the best.