One week of school down, but not quite swamped with work yet and there is a three day weekend so staying in Pittsburgh would be a crime. Kentucky here we come! We headed out on Friday night around 5pm, when we arrived and Miguel's it was more crowed then any of us had ever seen it. I felt very lucky just to find a parking space and a spot to put my tent.
The next morning when we woke up with the entire crowd I was a little bit worried that everything would be swamped, but when we headed out to Sunbeam Buttress in Muir Valley we did not see another person all day. We were able to get lots of good climbs in. The highlight of the day was at the Solarium wall were Tibo started projecting on a thin overhanging route called Mirage. We finished ourselves off at the great wall and then headed in for some extremely yummy Miguel's pizza.
The next day we headed over to roadside in the morning we planned on just doing a couple routes there and then heading back to Muir to finish up some projects from the previous day. However the allure of long overhanging jug hauls was too much. I managed to send pulling pockets after 3 attempt, Wes and I both crawled and hung our way of Return of Chris Synder, and Tibo hiked Up Yonder in his usual smooth style. When we finally made it to Muir we met up with Maryanna, Eric and Fedya who had head out earlier. We ran down pretty much every single route at Johnny Wall.
That night we went back ordered more pizza. Over dinner that night a couple important facts were learned. One English is the one language were Pineapples are not called Ananas, and two talking about MatLab and doing riddles over dinner at a climbers campground causes comments like, "You must be the CMU table."
For our last day we went back to Muir Valley again to wrap of the some projects. Maryanna put down a very impressive on-sight on Plate Techtonics and Tibo hopped back on Mirage to give it a redpoint go. At the end I don't think anyone really wanted to leave, but class awaits and the beautiful sandstone of the RRG gorge will be there for next time.
-M. Schnall