8-17-05: Wet Willy

Heidi Wertz hitting to the bottle while things dried out

Lyn and I had barely started to warm up when it started to hail. Our experience had been that it would hail maybe for a little bit, but then stop. It didn't stop. It only started to rain and rain hard. We scrambled to get our stuff together and ran over to Tommy's Arete so we could hang out under the boulder and get dry. I don't know how much it rained but it came down really hard for about 1/2 an hour. We were supposed to meet Robyn and friends up there but we figured that there was no way that they would come up after that storm. But as we were hanging out waiting for things to dry, Robyn, Abby, Matt and Heidi all showed up much to our surprise. It was still so wet that it drove some to drinking!


Abby on Deep Puddle Dynamics, v9

Lyn tried Tommy's Arete for a little bit but she had gotten pretty cold while waiting out the storm. We decided to head over to Deep Puddle Dynamics and give that a shot. Matt & Heidi had hiked up to the base of Long's Peak earlier in the day (only to be forced to turn back by the weather) and decided to they were too tired to climb, so they headed back to town. The rest of us tried Deep Puddle for a while but no one tried to send because the top-out was too wet.


Raza on Bush Pilot, v11

After a while we headed over to Bush Pilot so I could give it a try. I think it was one of the few things dry because there were about 12 climbers trying the problem. Kind of awkward to try it but there were plenty of pads. An old friend of mine from Las Vegas (and now Oakland) Kiyoshi was out with a large contingent of Japanese climbers. It was quite a surprise and nice to catch up with him while we climbed.

As per my pattern, I managed to do all the moves fairly quickly but fell off the last hard move about 3 times. I'm not sure why that happens to me but it seems to happen quite often. Maybe I'm not paying my gravity bill!

-Raza