America the Beautiful

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



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Chance

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Tony and I were joined by Andy, a friend Tony met in Edinburgh. We decided to climb Artebelleza on Innominata . It was fun to climb as a three, being more sociable at belays, and Andy fitted in comfortably with our established systems. The day took longer than planned however, a due to a combination of harder climbing than anticipated, the ropes getting stuck four times, and Tony needing to replace half of the rap-stations. Eventually, we reached the floor at dusk, and hurriedly packed our bags. I was warm and no one was above us, so I removed my helmet. We rushed to get down the steep snowy gully, hoping to reach the feint trailhead before darkness fell. Tony was somewhere ahead of Andy and me when an almighty cracking noise echoed from above. A pillar of rock the size of a row of terraces was falling away from the mountain directly above us. I yelled "oh fuck" in disbelief. It was surreal to see, and hard to believe this was about to happen to me. The main body of falli...
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Not the B-Y

The Bachar-Yerian, for those who don't know, is regarded as the classic hard frightener of California, if not the usa. Despite some effort, Dan and I did not climb this. Which came as quite a surprise to us, given the bold wall climbing we've done and the handy supertopo grade table making it sound about French 6c. This goes to show how wrong I can be. Persuaded by the guide that the sun would be on the wall from mid morning, we decided an early start would not provide any better conditions. The sun was just coming onto the wall when we arrived at 11.30, having evidently wasted the primo conditions of the day. Dan won paper scissors stone and took the first pitch. He split a tip (more a surgical gash than a split) and had to lower off. Using Dan's beta I got through the crux and kept going through the dangerous part, which felt a good E6 in its own right. I lowered off the second pitch, having climbed down after scaring myself high above a bolt, lost in a sea pc knobs. Som...
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Taking it easy and some thoughts on camp 4

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