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 ...