Reeve's Roadtrip Blog

"Hey Andy." I looked up. "You fancy another route?" He pronounced the word ' rowt ', rather than root , and drew out the 'A' of Andy into along syllable. His slow drawl sounded vaguely reminiscent of old Westerns, perfectly suiting the backdrop of sandstone cliffs and the scorching desert heat. My hands, feet, shoulders, even the pads of my thumbs, all recoil at the suggestion of more climbing; they need time to rest. "I think I'm done for the day", I try to let him down gently. And then, the same as yesterday, and probably the same as will happen tomorrow, comes Keith's charm: "but you know, Andy ... you'd look real good in that offwidth over there". Before I know it I'm tying in and clipping a dozen cams to my harness. I'm so easily seduced. I'd be disgusted with myself if I didn't secretly want to do it anyway. Keith surveying his kingdom. Or perhaps scouring the desert for his next rope-gun "W...

If a picture paints a thousand words, then this blogpost is 7014 words long (excluding captions or parentheses. As anyone who has struggled to edit an essay to get down to the word limit knows, no one counts captions or parentheses ). Yellowstone National Park. Top to bottom: Bison grazing, rainbow looking towards Hellroaring Mountain, riverside geyser doing what riverside geysers do, an elk by the Madison River Delicate Arch, Arches National Park Spooky Slot Canyon, Utah Zabriskie point, Death Valley. In the glare of the early-morning sun

I introduced myself to our campground neighbour, who in turn introduced himself. Vern is a local, so I ask him about Idaho. “Idaho? Well gee, just look around you, it’s full of rednecks” Unsure of the direction this conversation is taking, I go for a non-committal response: “How so?” “We’ve got our trucks, our flags, our guns… We're all rednecks round these parts. Heck, even I’m a redneck!” Treating the ‘R’ word as more pejorative than Vern’s usage of the term, I hesitate to respond. Fortunately Marie, who had joined us by this point, has no such qualms: “Cool, can I hold one of your guns?”. And thus the ice was broken. We set about getting to know the City of Rocks, Idaho’s premier climbing destination. Just because it is also Idaho’s sole climbing destination however, doesn’t mean it isn’t amazing. This is small-town potato-farming America’s answer to Brimham Rocks: a labyrinth jumble of granite, heavily patina’d and lightly bolted, phantastical forms of stone demanding ...

Like all terrible ideas which seem good at the time, we had both had a drink. Not much, but I'm looking for an excuse for my optimism. Or naivety, perhaps. I saw online that a permit for the Whitney zone had become available, suggested it to Marie, booked it, then went to sleep, safe in the knowledge that we would have a fun time camping in the mountains then climbing an easy multipitch. To see how wrong I can be, read on... A week later is 'walk-in day'. I wake with a start, already apprehensive even before I've had chance to make sense of my unfamiliar surroundings. We treated ourselves to a motel so that we would be fresh and have time to prepare, but we had a lot to do so we didn't quite get the early night we got to sleep late and are bit stressed. Marie rustling up some motel cuisine I'm not quite sure what I've let myself in for. All I know for certain is that Marie definitely doesn't know either. Maybe that's for the best at this stage. Befor...

Alternative title: Mixed Emotions in The Needles I've written about The Needles not  once , but twice  before. It's one of my favourite places on Earth, blending incredible featured granite, adventure beyond their stature, and a mystical aura further evoked by the names of each formation, such as the Witch, the Warlock, the Magician... It's fair to say, I'm completely bewitched. So when I read that the KNP Complex Wild Fire in 2021 had wreaked devastation across that whole area my heart sank. The road to the camping at the trail head only reopened in May this year, so I was expecting it to look very raw still. Wildfires are actually a normal and healthy part of the forests' life cycle. Tall dense trees stop sunlight penetrating their canopy and reaching the ground, meaning low lying plants (and hence food for animals) don't get a look in. Following a wildfire, these shrubs and plants are usually the first to colonise the now nutrient-rich ground. All the same, a...

I'm completely absorbed, so when Marie comes into the room she catches me off guard. I slam the laptop shut so she can't see, but in doing so I have inadvertently drawn attention to it. "Are you really watching it again?". Her expression is somewhere between disapproval and disgust. "It just came on because of the algorithm!" I exclaim, but my tone is too earnest so it ends up sounding like a bad excuse instead of a reasonable explanation. "What's so special about it" she admonishes me further "the lycra? The jazz-rock? Or the unacknowledged androgyny?" She walks out the room before I can answer.  She must have come in for a good reason, but whatever it was has been left unattended to. I have an urge to call after her, but anything I say now would only make it worse. I sigh, but despite it all I can't help myself. I open the laptop again and wait for the video to buffer, allowing me time to wallow in my shame. It finally loads: Ma...