This is Matus drinking home made "shine" at 6:30 in the morning, to be fair i made him do it , by letting him see the bottle. Its not his fault really, I was asking for it by having the bottle hidden in the back of a closet behind a box of granola.
Anyway, Matus lives in LA and used to work for Mad Rock, thats how we met. Today he is in denver, he got bumped of a previous flight with his girlfriend to Austin and so the airline game him as they say in the hood, "coupons" and so he now travels cheap and so has ended up in Denver with me.
Our goal was to adventure and climb and possible dry tool up a route on Halletts ( a place i have been spending a lot of time recently) . This is how it went.
Lesson #1 Being ignorantly confident is a perk, despite minor obvious draw backs, it allows you to try things you have no business doing. How else are you going to learn? Building up a solid base of knowledge and starting off slow in normal alpine spring conditions, i think not.
Happy and eager, describes us. Prior to any climbing really, as the story goes.
To be honest i am a poor alpine climber, my technical knowledge is low and i have little experience in snow. With that said, i try. Really i throw myself into things i probably shouldn't. This is how i got good at everything else i can do well, and so it applies here. I want to be solid like Doug Shepherd or Kelly Cordes or Dan Gambino but i'm just not yet.
Moving on....
Basically we walking to the base of Halletts and didn't know where any of the routes started and so i just started climbing, that lasted for about an hour until i slipped while dry tooling around a smooth arete and took a 20 foot whipper into a rock dihedral. Then i hit the ground, good thing it was covered with snow.
I took this photo from the lake just below Halletts.
Lesson #2 dont let your belayer look for stuff in his back pack with loops of slack while your flailing away on scary new terrain.
Lesson #3 don't be weak and fall
My whole body hurts today, frankly i can't believe i didn't brake anything, but i do have some sweet "swellbow" . I know it was a bad fall because Matus showed a minute of sympathy , which never happens. When i snapped my finger in half in the sierras ( i broke it and dislocated it ) he calmly told me no one cares about my finger and we should keep hiking, without hearing moans from me.
In any case since i was already at the ground, so we decided we should try and climb another route.
Round 2.
We decide to walk up a shoot of snow that appears as thought it will definitely avalanche and get to the base of a giant chimney . We think that swimming through vertical snow is not as much fun as we wanted it to be so we adventure out of the chimney and onto unknown rock and terrain, climbing ledge to ledge, soloing and roping up from time to time. Terrified sums up the feeling i had most. Matus appeared to be indifferent except that he had run out of cigarettes which aggravates him.
Lesson #3 when something looks dangerous, feels dangerous, it most likely is dangerous. Taking into account my absolutely insufficient knowledge of avalanche mumbo jumbo it was fair to say Darwin was on my side. In case your wondering, my genes are still readily available in our collective pool. Your welcome.
We make it about 200 feet from the top and its Matus's turn to lead, he climbs something so dumb and dangerous that i bowed out. He soloed a super sketch dihedral of snow and rock with no gear except a rope tied to me , so if he fell at least i was going for a ride too. In any case he got stuck and i had to lower him off a icy horn of rock because leaving a cam was not something we thought of and then we rapped all the way down.
so the over all thoughts on this experience. FUCKING AWESOME. I'm tired of writing so i am going to go climbing.... at the warm, easy to navigate, music playing, no wind gym.
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