I’ll take Places With Snow On Them for 800 thanks Alex.
Approaching: Halloween, moving house, the ski hill opening, ice climbing season, pulling on plastic in the bouldering gym, back country ski trips, frozen lakes, temperatures in the minus 20s, Christmas.
Fast becoming distant memories: Visiting Australia, riding the single trail after work, rock climbing after work, daylight from 5.30am til 11pm, squirrels, calling out so bears wouldn’t eat me, scrambling up mountains, jumping into lakes.
There’s not much point to this post other than to show off our mountains. They are becoming increasingly snow-covered. Come November I’ll probably be moving to the dark side of the valley (up underneath thum thare snowy mountains), so you’ll get to see more of the other mountains – won’t that be exciting?
I should be asleep – can this possibly still be jet-lag or has it crossed the boundary into random insomnia?
As if I haven’t done enough gadding about already this year, I have decided to travel across the Pacific Ocean and go to Australia. And then come back again 3 weeks later. Although I’m tempted by Anonymous Lefty’s noble and environmentally conscious scheme of going by ship, I shall probably just stick with an aeroplane. This is the route I shall direct the pilot to take:
So in two days time I’ll probably be hanging out at an airfield of some sort, trying to hitch a ride on a plane. Or a zeppelin.
While the snow continued its attempts to sneak down into town, the sun won out today. The cloud was burnt off by mid-morning, and most of the overnight sprinkling of snow on the surrounding mountains had disappeared by afternoon. Perfect climbing weather. In this case, being lazy and going to the nearest crag to town – surely no-one else will have had the same idea.
The top section of the Grassi Lakes climbing area has been opened again for a couple of weeks now, so there are a lot of people coming out to climb on the climbs that have been off limits for the last year or two.
The weather’s taken a turn for the unpredictable recently – weather forecasts keep looking promising, then turning to scattered showers the day beforehand, and the day in question ends up being miserable and rainy. And that’s exactly what happened when I tried to finally climb at Lake Louise.
There was low cloud lurking through the Bow Valley, and all the way along the drive there.
“It’ll be fine!” we said. “At least it’s not raining!” we said. The rock was horribly cold and uninspiring. The longer you spent on the climb, the more warmth was sapped from your fingers and your toes, so instead of warming up you’d just get colder and colder, until you couldn’t really feel your fingers at all, and your big toes were definitely quite numb (possibly your next toes too, and some of the others). You’d have to place your feet and hands visually and hope the hold was good enough to stick to, as it was just impossible to tell by feel.
By the time we finished the second climb (which was actually quite fun climbing on Arapiles-style horizontals) it was a little warmer. Perhaps we would keep going. But then it started to rain. We retired to town for hot chocolate and brownies.
