Laraway Mountain and Ramp Ravioli!

Last Weekend was one of the best we have had in a while weather wise and Steph and I spent it with some friends hiking on the long trail.  We did a section that is pretty lightly used just north of Johnson VT and I also found a cliff that I think I will go back to and put a sport route up.  The cliff is right off the trail and the climbing looks excellent on these small and large pockets that are pretty untypical of VT.  There are even a couple of Mono type holds.  I am thinking it is going to make some excellent pocket climbing like training for limestone type climbs.  The cliff also overhangs like 15 degrees which is cool.  More on that later.  Project....

The Hike
We started out on Friday at route 109 and hiked in two miles to a really new and nice shelter.  IT was a neat one with barn doors and a sky-light.  Saturday morning we did 7 miles and ended at another neat shelter where I found some ramps on the descent into camp.  Dinner at camp consisted of Thai style peanut noodles with chicken, ramps, a red pepper and other food ( I think I gained weight on this trip).  Sunday we hiked over laraway mountain and back to our cars.  On the way up in the morning I stopped for about 20 minutes and got a bunch more ramps and the final 5 miles was hiking but I was just really thinking of how I was going to cook the ramps.  Hiking always gets boring for me so I find my mind wandering...

The Meal:

Back home after a little Internet research I found a recipe for ramp ravioli at a Fork My Life blog!  I am starting to think that soon cookbooks will be all outdated and no one will have them.  They will go out of print and people will just follow blogs.  After seeing a recipe on a blog complete with up to date pictures I decided it is how I want cooking how-to's to be for me.  If only climbing techniques could be learned so easily. 




Steph Expressed experience to learn how to make ravioli so we had this endeavor together.  We did this on Tuesday night.  I have to be thankful for the granite slab kitchen table that we have and got at a yard sale.  It is a great surface for these types of things.

It made for a fun evening and something to do.  Steph started asking about doing rice noodles and other things that were exotic with the maker so maybe I will have to start doing food blogging in the near future.   





 I have to thank one a friend of my parents friends Janet Tambascio for teaching me to make ravioli back when I was homeschooling for high school. 

Intimidation and head games!

Well this weekend I ate some humble pie.... Steph and I went to Marshfield for some serious granite climbing.  We had been to this cliff and climbed once before and I remembered it as being big but I forgot how awesome it really is.  You drive to Groton which is the middle of nowhere VT and then get on an old logging railroad bed that is now a road and drive 2 miles until you get to a spur road.  The road gets progressively worse so I just stop where there is a good pull off and don't beat on my truck too much. 

From there it is a half an hour hike on logging roads, faint trails and across an old beaver type flow area. The cliff is between 300 and 700 feet tall in places and has some really good slabs, faces, and features on it but it is exploratory type terrain.  Because it is so tall you can see a bolt line going up the cliff and think all the climbing will be bolts but then you get to pitch two and find you need gear.  The rock also can change as you go up so it can go from grainy to smooth slabs or holds to no holds.  All of this adds to the commitment.

When I first looked at the weather in the morning I saw that the percent chance of rain had gone up to 50% from 9-4pm so when it got cold briefly I questioned if I should start up the mossy slab. The sun came out a few minutes later and Steph was saying I should go so we went for it. 

I picked a slab that was close to the trial in where it met the cliff just thinking it would be a nice long moderate with a chance to explore and really see the cliff. 

I started up a relatively clean but with some lichen that looked like it would vanish as I went up.  It ended up being about 5.7 with one hard move at the bottom and was 4 bolts over about 110 feet so it was a little run out. For the last ten feet getting to the first ledge which was full of branches and leaves and was a little heady on lead since I have only been climbing in well travelled areas lately.  Steph made short work of the slab on toprope and so I started off exploring the sections above when I was back on belay. 

It turned out to be another slab pitch after doing some high angle leaf crawl/climbing on lichen to get to the clean stuff again.  As I was going up the rock got cleaner and cleaner but the rope drag got pretty bad and the bolts got really spaced out even though the climbing got harder. The rock also got pretty smooth.  The bolts started traversing to the right and they had some space so I just kept telling myself I would make it to the next one and see not knowing the grade or anything else. 

After 4 bolts on pitch two like that and around 100 feet I was heading out and feeling bad so I rested at a stance and tried to talk myself into the rest and had no luck.   We bailed..... It was a neat day and we had the whole cliff to ourselves.  There is so much adventure climbing there and so few people show up to do it. This is one area that is so close to home for me that I have to start getting out here more.   I guess humble pie never tasted so good!

Franconia Notch Day

I spent Sunday at Echo cliff and profile cliff with Zach and Ryan two friends that live locally.  Zach has been climbing with me a couple times and this was really the first time that I had climbed with Ryan. 

It turned out to be a pretty good day.  We started off on Natural High 5.7 as a warm up which is the gem of Profile.  It is a long alpine pitch which wanders left and right but has some good face climbing and a really nice setting.  Since neither Zach nor Ryan had done this climb I really wanted them to get on it because it is awesome.  The second climb that we did saw called Birthday Bolts and goes at 5.9.  We also got to toprope this route called Syko's arete that I have always wanted tto try.  It looks really good and it turned out to be exactly what I wanted.  It was hard for me and I had to fall once to learn the sequence.   I have really been searching for climbs like this where the climb can be tried and climbed and then I can come back later to get it as clean as possible.  Especially on different rock types and different angles.

The last part of the day we hiked back down to Echo cliff and finished on a couple of climbs that Zach and Ryan had not done but that were good teachers of technique.

Little Rock Travel

When I have been travelling lately I have been thinking to myself is this a place I could live?  For some it is immediately a definite nope.  For others it is a maybe. And for some it is a almost no brainer. 

It is not that I want to move somewhere but that I need something to do while I am stuck on the plane to my real home and have finished my book or my climbing magazine or my two free drinks if I am lucky enough. 

Also because Steph and I have been looking for houses for two years and we are at that exhausted time where things just never seem to be the right one or the right price or location. It must be easier for me to compromise on a location in other states when you are only there for a day and the day turns out good. 

With little rock it had the good qualifications.  Cheaper housing that was in good condition.  Cheap cost of living in general.  A climbing gym that was 6.25$ to drop in on for an evening of bouldering and also my personal highlight of the trip.  The bike path leading to "Big Dam Bridge".  

My real motivation to go to Little Rock, AR was a work trip to a paper mill south of there that makes paperboard going into packaging. Without mentioning manufacturer names I will say that anyone who eats a tub of ice cream will appreciate their paperboard mill in AR as this is the board typically compromising of a bottom or side layer to this container. 

In my 4 hours of daylight left after the audit I got to run on the bike trails around little rock which are being greatly expanded and get a few hours of bouldering in before heading back to the hotel.  This lead me to the realization that travel can be OK if you get 2-4 hours to do what you want at the end of the day before going back to the angry company or on to the next mill on day two of the audit trip.  For me part two of this trip was exactly that.  But at least for this trip I was able to go running the day before and clear my head between days one and two.


Learning to Jump Rope

Yesterday I was learning or relearning to jump rope for the first time in my life again and I had to laugh.  I forgot how hard and uncoordinated I always felt with this.  There was also always a little of a thing where I was afraid that other kids would laugh at me.  Now as an adult I was with 15 other adults trying to jump rope and it is clear that once you have it, it is like riding  a bike.  My wife got it right off the bat.  I think she had done about a hundred jumps before I could do twenty.  Every time the rope hit my sneakers I just had to laugh.

This weekend is raining so no outdoor climbing for me :(

Multi-Sport Day

This past Saturday was really good.  At 7am Steph and I were up and quickly packing to make it out the door.  We were headed to Franconia Notch in NH.  The goal was another mountain Steph had never climbed and another tic for our list of summits together. 
Ever since our honeymoon I have been scheming to get us as a married couple to the top of all the 48 peaks.  The honeymoon was about 30 miles of the AT from hut to hut so it got us a good sampling of the whites and now slowly we have been getting ones here and there.  For April I was really happy that we could have an objective as hard and with as little snow that was a 4000 footer. 

We ended up in the parking lot to start hiking at 10am and quickly geared up and got going. The weather was great and the skies were blue. It was impressive how dry the first two miles of trail were.  After about three thousand feet in elevation it was snow the rest of the way. We had no extra gear.  No spikes, no snowshoes, no extra warm clothes and we were going almost light and fast alpine style was what was going on in the back of my head.  We passed one guy that seemed to think we were under prepared but we made it just fine.  When I told him my strategy was to let the group of 15 that had spikes and packed down the trail get us a highway to the summit I think he realized that there are lots of ways to get to Rome.  Whether or not you are doing what the Romans do.  Another one of the blogs that I have been following is the Committed blog.  It has a couple that really wants to do North America's 50 classic climbs and they have taken a video on each one.  One of the glacier climbs to the base of a Teton has them putting full on crampons onto a sneaker to just get by with what they have.  that 15 seconds of YouTube video tells it how I want it to be for me if I am going for that kind of objective.  So no, I do not think that we are to that caliber but "to each their own".
At the top I again became infatuated with Cannon and its cliff.  I took a picture because I thought it was a neat picture and we spent some time on the summit because it was a clear day and the weather was great.  Hopefully Steph's second alpine climb of length will be on cannon.  We have been thinking of doing Lakeview for a couple years and I think it is almost time.
The hike down was what we were un-used to. Slippery and steep for 3 miles down.  When we were back to the car I went and fished my victory beer out of the stream where it was being kept cold and we drove up to Echo Crag for a couple pitches before dark.  I ended up leading one climb that was about 55 feet to top rope the 4 climbs on either side of it.  In about an hour I got 5 climbs in and we were ready to drive home.

12 summits down as a couple and 5 pitches of training!

The Red Green Show

In Richmond they have completed half of a project repainting their bridge and they are supposed to resume after the winter and since seems to be over I have been waiting for the bridge to be completed.

I find myself thinking of when I was a kid and I used to watch the red green show where they make things out of duct aped together rusted cr@p and laugh about it. It reminds me that things can be creative and do not have to fit inside the norm. I am trying to just let myself run and be happy with my pace and distance whatever it is since I am just happy that I am getting out. The trails have gone from mud/snow to now snow/ice and they are much firmer than the soft fall and now we are entering both a drought and fire hazard and things are going to be dry.

At work we signed up for a relay for the burlington marathon so I have some extra training partners in the afternoons sometimes.  It is giving me a good goal to train for.  I am hoping that my almost 7 mile section I can do less than 8 minute miles over the course of things or less.  We are going to be making shirts for our teams with the Rainforest Alliance Seal on them  and hopefully the wording "sustainagility"  or maybe follow the frog as a little business thing.  I found out the other day that HR will pay for them which I am happy about. 

One thing that I keep revisiting is my rock climbing rack of gear.  By getting rid of certain gear you shave pounds of weight and hopefully help yourself for the final send.  I took my full rack of 20 plus cams and 20 plus draws and got it down to 7 cams and 12 combined draws and 6 nuts that will be pretty light in terms of weight this year.  I am excited to see if it is going to work. 

Today I spent at Rumney again and we did 4x5.10 climbs and 5x5.9s.  The day was really good and it was good to flash some 10s.  I wish I was able to push myself a little more training wise though.  None the less it was a good time.