Canton Air Sports, OH

This was our first big trip of the 2008 fall semester. Greg MacLean and I brought out nine students, all of them first-time tandems. The weather forecast had called for a beautiful, sunny Sunday, but that's not exactly what we found shortly after we arrived at Canton Air Sports. The winds kept picking up, the sky was overcast, and it lightly rained. I knew that the weather would improve by the afternoon, but that did not prevent me from fearing that some of the students might not get to jump. Fortunately, the rain did not last long and the weather cleared periodically, giving everyone a chance to do their tandem jumps. The weather actually became quite beautiful by mid-afternoon. Greg and I got two jumps in; our second was above a high layer of clouds that made spotting the dropzone impossible. We used a GPS to determine where the plane was relative to the airport, waited a while to get upwind, and jumped. It turned out to be a perfectly good spot. Thanks to everyone who attended!

-M. Jehn

Frankfort Mineral Springs

New River Gorge, WV

After a very fun week of five days of work jammed into four because of the labor day getting out of Pittsburgh for Saturday and Sunday is just what we all needed. Fedya, Maryanna, Lisa, and I met Saturday morning to head down to the New. We packed up the car and three hours later we arrived at Summersville Lake to do some sport climbing. We started off and got a good number of climbs in before the weather started to get very ominous. We moved our stuff under a large roof and decided to go for a swim in the lake. We got lucky and the weather never really rolled in and we kept climbing until it got dark and got back to car by headlamp.

The next morning, after some fun around the campfire with a green laser pointer we headed out to Tattoo Wall at Bubba City. After a little bit of trouble finding the climbing area we got there to find quite a crowd of people, but there were plenty of routes to go around. Everyone got to tire themselves out. Then came the worst part of any trip, the part where we head back to Pittsburgh.

-M. Schnall

Lower Yough, PA

The Lower Yough (LY) is a classic class III run that is less than 1.5 hours away from Pittsburgh.  We put on the river at 11AM and didn’t get off the river until 5pm!!  That is the longest LY trip I have ever done!  Everyone had a great day on the water.  We played and surfed for a long time in Entrance.  David and Jeff both were able to get their flat spins to work at Donut Hole and Nemo’s Hole.  Everyone had great lines trough Dimple Rapid and we got to witness a lot of raft carnage.  We probably stayed at Swimmers’ Rapid for 2.5 hours!  We were able to have a ‘party wave’ with 5 people in it!   We had a blast at Swimmers’.  When we got off of the river, we even found someone to shuttle 2 of our boats to the car!  It turned out to be a great weekend of kayaking.

-B. Kish

Red River Gorge, KY

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