Category: general

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general

weekend of no climbing

West Virginia has proven to be rather wet of late, with three of the last four weekends involving far too much rain. And it’s unlikely to let up any time soon, as Hurricane Katrina will be headed that way after doing its best on New Orleans (of course, it won’t be a hurricane any more, just a patch of nasty weather).

It stopped raining for about 46 minutes* over the weekend. Long enough to set up a slackline in the campground, and fall off it a few times.

slacklining

In other news, the fabric on my thermarest has started bubbling, so when I inflate it, it now looks like it has a tumour. I didn’t like to mention anything infront of it, but I think perhaps its days are numbered. On the plus side, I now own down booties (and I hadn’t realised I could construct a sentence using the letters ‘wno’ so many times).

* Time quoted may be an exaggeration

Categories
general

a query

Traffic lights – inbetween being green and red, what colour are they?

Categories
general

not quite 1000 paper cranes

When I was younger, I remember reading the book Sadako and the 1000 paper cranes. Sadako was trying to fold 1000 paper cranes – according to a Japanese legend, she would then get a wish. In a rather garbled take on this idea, I’m helping my friend fold 1000 paper cranes as a gift for someone else. We’re not quite there yet. One thousand paper cranes is rather a lot.

climbers swarming
Categories
climbing general trip reports

sinful hotbed

More photos from that sinful hotbed of wet climbing activity, Summersville Lake.

The hoards, they were swarming across the rock.

climbers swarming

Henry found a fun looking hand traverse, which he set out across once the photographers were in place

henry on the hand traverse

Lara jumps off the cliff. The highest style points from the weekend go to Alyce though, who was the only one to do a flip off the cliff (a perfectly executed one at that).

jumping

We had reached Longs Point when we started hearing the thunder, and the call from Ocean (ex-lifeguard) came: “Out of the water kids!”. The large bearded gentleman, pictured flying through the air, managed to climb up onto the arete wearing sneakers only.

jumping

Ocean tried to follow up after him, but got stuck at this point under the roof: “I have to throw for that?”.

ocean at longs point

Also, note to google: “Air Cloud online”. Is that really the best you can do when I do a search for work related sites, and you’re desperately trying to find relevant things to advertise? Because I don’t want to buy an air cloud. I have no idea what they are, but it doesn’t seem to be something I should be paying for. However, if what you’re trying to sell to me is actually a little miniature atmosphere system, that can hang out in the rooms of my house, so I have little cloud systems and miniature fronts developing across my roof, then that would be rather cool, and I wholeheartedly approve (provided they’re not going to rain on me).

Categories
climbing general trip reports

deep water deep water deep water

The weekend was spent playing in the water at Summersville Lake (deep water soloing if you will). We had a pontoon on Saturday, until a thunderstorm came along, and some people started to get dubious about how well lightning and metal boats go together. So the boat was returned, we were pelted with rain for 3 minutes, then the weather was perfectly fine again. Of course!

Lara and Captain Ducky (or possibly Admiral Ducky?), one of the more awesome floaties from the weekend.
 

lara and captain ducky

Boer jug hauling his way up the arete
 

boer climbs at summersville lake

Plans to go bouldering at full moon were ruined by the weather, which kept getting overcast and thunderstorming on us. Come Sunday morning, everything was soaking wet, and most of the crew were keen to get back to civilisation – except for the hardy group who fought their way down to Pirates Cove and swam around in the sun, enjoying the views and gorgeous sunny weather for a few more hours. I don’t know how we managed to do it, really I don’t.


Val in Pirates Cove on Sunday morning
 

summersville lake