Moving house was, for once, pretty gratifying. After two semesters in the hotel-like accomodations (and hotel-like prices) of the University Apartments I was beyond ready to find some place new. As luck would have it, my good buddy Joe was moving out of his likewise unglamourous habitation around the same time, and was on the hunt for a new place and new roommates. Somehow he got wind of a great deal: big-ish town house, large garage, very reasonable rent, situated not four blocks from my lab. Nice neighborhood, too:
After a swift inspection and a word with the slightly otherworldly landlord we put pen to paper, along with Pat from the UW ski team as a third man. As an aside, this was before I had passed my assessment exam, so theoretically Joe and Pat could've been left standing with a useless lease as I took the slow plane back to Sweden. They looked faintly panicked when I explained this in detail, but I must admit their faith in my ability to not get fired was flattering. However, when all was said and done there were still three of us in Laramie, and we could move in. Joe and I (Pat had already left for Alaska to work) spent a sweaty Sunday moving hauling literally tons of crap into the place - my contribution was dwarfed by Joe's gargantuan collection of miscellaneous possessions. We quickly settled in:
I finally got a bigger kitchen to dirty up when I get to cooking, too:
And finally, le clue de spectacle, my first ever in-house washer+dryer. No more laundromat for me!
Two other activities that never seem to get old are traveling and climbing, and they combine nicely. I'm on my sixth climbing season now, and the obsession seems to get stronger rather than weaker as time goes by. Climbing always has something new for me: new types of rock, new types of cracks, new places to go. And the fear of instant, messy death by lead fall never gets stale, either. One of the best parts is doing routes I've never seen before, and there's no better way of doing that than going to a novel climbing area. This weekend I hit Lumpy Ridge, one of the premier spots for long climbs on flawless granite in the West. It's located on the eastern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, an immense expanse of mountainous wilderness in northern Colorado. And from what little I saw of it, it looks durn purty:
I went there with Jen, who hadn't been down to the Park for years and wanted to get some adventure climbing in. Lumpy is sufficiently alpine to offer more adventure than Vedauwoo - long approach hikes, multi-pitch routes, complicated descents and few to no bolts - but close enough to civilization that we couldn't possibly get Really Fucked. The rock is pristine white granite, bulletproof and infinitely more skin-friendly than our local offerings. The crags you scale are a bit more impressive, too:
We chose to climb one of the reputedly finest easy routes in Lumpy Ridge: Mainliner (5.9). It takes one of the many long dihedrals left of the Turnkorner Roof (visible in the picture above), through some interesting bulges, 600 feet straight up the immaculate granite face of Sundance. I didn't quite know what to expect when I got up there, but I was pleasantly surprised: clean lines on beautiful rock, composed mostly of juggy jaunts sharply punctuated by short technical sections. In fact, it was very similar to Swedish granite climbing, just on a bigger scale. We also managed to build in some extra adventure by forgetting the guidebook in Laramie, leaving us only with vague Internet descriptions along the lines of "climb generally left to a sloping area" and "descend east". Due to this lack of information, and being conditioned by Vedauwoo to end each climb on a huge ledge, my climbing tended to take me pretty much as far as the rope would reach - instead of stopping every 100 feet or so. Fortunately for me, this method netted me leads of pretty much all the cool sections on the route. Jen was not amused, but since she was literally on a leash for the duration she just had to like it. It's also symptomatic of my current crack climbing binge that I went "Yes, finally!" when I encounted a flaring, off-width pod at the crux of the route. Locking into the overhanging finger crack above the pod felt infinitely better than frictioning across the low-angle slabs below. After topping out and sharing some celebratory energy bars, we went looking for the descent. It took us a good long while and some dicey down-soloing to locate the gigantic gully we were after, so finding some crunchy-old webbing to rap off was like Christmas in July. After that, we just had to contend with the steep hike back to civilization before we could have icy cold beer:
The last piece of good news is that I'm now licensed to drive in the state of Wyoming - and the rest of the US, for that matter. This is the fourth jurisdiction that grants me a license (Ohio, Sweden and Australia also did, in that order), so I have lots of experience of the process by now. The red tape was much as I remembered it: pass a written and practical test, take a bad picture, fill out documents stating that I'm not insane or without one my limbs, etc. The difference between Sweden and the US is that you cannot possibly fail the tests here if you're even slightly competent behind the wheel of a car. The written test poses questions like "If you're at a railway crossing and see a train coming, you should...?" and offers only one sane alternative of action. I got to demonstrate my somewhat rusty driving skills by heading into town, changing lanes once, turning right three times, and then driving back to the testing station. If I'd been dead drunk or legally blind, that might've presented a problem, but fortunately none of those conditions applied on Monday morning. So all I need to do now is wait for the plastic card to arrive in the mail, and I can stop telling the bartenders "My age is on line three" every time I order a drink. It also means I can get a vehicle of my own, and that's none too soon. There is literally no way of getting out of Laramie without a car, and there's certainly no reason to stay in town if you're not working. Looking forward to an expansion of my horizons - but not looking forward to paying the ever-accelerating price of gasoline. I remember when gas went above $1.50 and people were outraged. Now we've passed $4/gallon and are fast headed for $5. Oh, well, I'll just have to con Tom into continuing to drive my ass up to Vedauwoo...
