Summer!

Yes siree, summer finally came to the High Plains. The last two weeks have offered more warm weather than the last six months put together, and I've more than passed my personal mark for Start of the Season: climbing a route without my shirt on. Climbing in Vedauwoo, though, makes you consider that decision carefully. Nonetheless, the sun is shining, my pasty white ass is slowly tanning into something more healthy, and life is good in general. Wyoming summers are beautiful, and nearly make up for the brutal winter weather. One shouldn't be fooled, though -- two weeks ago the temperatures went from 80 degrees and sunshine on Tuesday to 32 degrees and snow showers on Wednesday. The climate could still jump up and smack me one at any given moment. But who cares, when this is what you see on most days:



Now that summer is finally here, I've ramped up the climbing part of my trinity of daily activities (science, climbing and drinking). Several days a week at Vedauwoo and two recent trips (Lander, WY and Black Hills, SD) is putting more than gristle on my bones:



Although I still have a hard time keeping up with Uncle Meat (aka Tom):



Tom is in turn dwarfed by Jeff, former Vedauwoo local and abdicated king of the Buckhorn Saloon. At 6'4'' and a good 230 lbs, Jeff is not just a giant of a man but also the proud owner of the foulest mouth in Wyoming. In my favorite Alpinist article, he gets a worthier write-up than I could provide here. The story about the deaf-mute girl alone (ending with the line "Well, at least there wasn't any small-talk!") had me alternating between laughing and going "God, that's so wrong!", and there were infinitely worse tales to come that day. But despite it all, he still floats up 5.12 sport routes at will, which is remarkable for a man of his build:



I had a great weekend up in Lander with Tom, Jeff and Tim, another ex-Laramite. The endless yanking on plastic this winter finally paid off as I onsighted 5.11a and toproped my way up 5.12a. This was lightyears beyond anything I'd climbed previously, and I was pleasantly surprised by the limestone in Sinks Canyon. It felt a bit odd at first - there's no such thing as limestone sport climbing in Sweden - but it obviously suits me quite well. Rumor has it that Wild Iris, another couple of miles up the road, caters even better to my brute-force-over-delicate-balance method of ascent. Can't wait to go there!

At the home crag, the race to get in shape (or get back there in Tom's case) has been on for a couple of weeks. We've gotten horribly spanked on a variety of burly climbs (e.g. Flying Buttress), had some bouldering success (I finally passed the bathang move on Nats Three Star Roof) and gotten close on the straight-forward-but-pumpy classic Spectreman. Neither one of us was anywhere near sending Women's Work, but I got some pretty sweet shots of it:





Most recently I've been off to the Black Hills, South Dakota. Tom was meeting old friends of his from New Mexico, who had been swearing up and down for years that the Needles housed some of the most unique climbing in the West. I tagged along, happy to get to travel a little bit. However, after reading up on where we were going, I was slightly apprenhensive: the Needles have a vicious reputation for being slabby and extremely runout. I can deal with being far above my last piece if I'm feeling solid (e.g. locked into a crack or on huge jugs), but I hate slab - mostly because I'm so bad at it.

My first surprise had nothing to do with climbing, though, and everything to do with landscape. When we rolled into the Black Hills late on Friday, a strong feeling of familiarity crept up on me. After I took a closer look, I realized that I'd just arrived in the US equivalent of northern Sweden:



The more I looked, the more I felt that I'd traveled half-way around the world just to arrive back in Norrland. Bit of a bummer, to tell you the truth - I like my destinations kind of exotic. But I was soon treated to some of that: wild turkeys were running around, chipmunks bounced off the trees and the rock formations were really weird:



As for the climbing, it was mostly as expected. The "classics" included horrific runouts on slick feldspar crystals that would occasionally pop off and send you flying. Topping out some of the thin spires was a real trip, though, and if you're brave enough (I certainly wasn't!) you can try the Needles rappel:



After the first day we were not amused, but the fact that we got consistently either spanked (on 5.10) or scared witless (on 5.8) probably had something to do with that. The climbing at the Needles is so far removed from both Vedauwoo and Sinks Canyon that it might as well not be the same sport. Pessimism quickly set in.

Our second day turned out way better, though. After a slow start (beer takes its toll) we found ourselves at the base of the Conn Diagonal. At 5.7, its three pitches promised to be a pleasant romp. The climb is fairly unique: it follows a gigantic flake several hundred feet up a sheer cliff face, creating easier climbing with fantastic exposure. I was fairly gripped on some of the less secure moves (one is required to climb the outside of the flake occasionally), but the going was easy enough that it was fairly enjoyable. The second pitch is a spectacular hand traverse with hundreds of feet of empty air below your feet, and pitch three delivers you safe into the bosom of a friendly chimney. All in all, highly recommended.

After coming off the Diagonal, Tom spotted something in the distance that he'd seen in Climbing magazine recently. What looked like a thin-ish crack from afar split the Egg spire almost in half, promising severly overhung climbing at the start:



With two days of mincing around on teensy footholds behind us, it was time for revenge, and Michael's Crack (maybe 5.11+) could provide it. The crux, however, proved to be pretty fiddly itself (passing a wide pod at the lip of a roof):



Once you scream your way past the lip (applying anger always helps in situations like these), you still have to contend with 20 feet of overhanging hands/cups/fists:



Unfortunately, once the angle lessens the crack widens to rattly fists and the rock quality turns to absolute shit. Loose blocks and licheny footholds abound, which disqualifies the climb from a list of real classics. The first half of it is spectacular, though, and worth the suffering up top. Another 20 ascents or 5 hours with the Umeå Crew would probably set it straight. Pity it's in the middle of a National Park... Think we could sneak in at night?

I'm not fired!

Hooray -- my ass didn't get booted back to Sweden today!

For various reasons, I normally don't blog about my work or the people I work with, but today there's definitely call for celebration. As part of the MCLS program (which I'm in) here at the University of Wyoming, there's a big exam at the end of year 1. For those of you who have the skinny on PhD'ing it in Sweden, think of it as the equivalent of Stora Tentan. Basically it covered the techniques involved in actually doing wet lab molecular biology (gels, pipettes, assays, screens, methods), the essentials of biochemistry and related fields. Needless to say, the scope of it all was somewhat... wide. And we were told that our continued employment here, and hence legal right to reside in the US, was contingent on doing quite well on it.

So I spent pretty much every waking moment for two weeks preparing for this nebulously described test of my abilities. "Tentaångest" doesn't even begin to describe what I felt the morning of Exam Day -- because you can always re-take it back home. This one was basically do-or-die, in typical American fashion. And after writing the damn thing for seven and half hours, I felt about ready to kill myself. Ten hours at the bar cured that impulse, but I still had to wait for the results all of last week.

Finally, at about 3 PM local time, the other shoe dropped. I received a boringly formulaic letter congratulating me on being "promoted to the second year of the program". A lot of stress dissolved reading those words, although I admit that the language used wasn't exactly encouraging. However, I imagine that the letter that about half of the incoming class got was even less encouraging: rumor has it 5 people got fired at the exact same time the rest of us were released from purgatory. I confess to a certain morbid curiosity about who it was, and by the end of the week I'll know. Actually, by the end of the day I might know -- as long as the shots I'm having in half an hour don't wipe that knowledge out. Have one for me tonight!

Twister

I've just had another genuine American West experience: getting hit by a tornado! I'm fine, though, since I wasn't particularly close to the path of it - and in any case, no known casualities in Laramie. It still had some pretty fearsome power, though: perfectly horisontal hail the size of marbles, all the cars in the Ford dealership getting their windshields blown out, equipment sheds flying around and big trees getting uprooted. Rumor has it that it killed at least one person south of us, where it was worst. The main effect in Laramie was probably knocking out much of the power grid, but fortunately it turned back on just 30 minutes ago. Hopefully no-one got hurt, although if there were people in the greenhouse north of Walmart (the tornado touched down there and ripped it open)...

In some sense I guess we should've seen it coming. The weather has been really screwy for days, with rain and thunder coming left and right. It also poured down for more than 12 straight hours, which has only happened once here in the last four years or so. And as a final Official Bad Omen, they showed the movie "Twister" on TV last night! We didn't see any green clouds on the horizon, but it's not like I have windows in my lab to see out of. Nonetheless, I'm a bit taken aback. Discounting the odd storm (Gudrun comes to mind) and some flash flooding, there is no such thing as a "natural disaster" back home. Being trapped at the Department for a few hours, waiting for the wind to subside, felt like something of a personal insult. Maybe I shouldn't move to California, after all.

But now all is fine and dandy. The fridge kept its cool through the power outage, so I'm enjoying some beer and cookies while I type this up. Didn't get much done at work, admittedly, but I'm pretty happy I was there instead of up at Vedauwoo -- my home crag reputedly got absolutely trashed by the winds. Guess we'll be pulling downed trees off the roads for a few weeks now. Bummer, because the summer climbing season proper had just started, with the very first Official T-Shirt Day coming in on Tuesday. The weather certainly is crazy here in the Cowboy State, but that's part of the charm. "Bless Wyoming and keep it wild", as Helen Mettler once put it.

Jag mötte Lassie

Back in the early 90's, Swedish-pretty-women-group Ainbusk Singers had a hit with their song "Jag mötte Lassie" (lit. "I met Lassie"). I don't even remember what it was about originally, but the phrase soon morphed (via a column in a local tabloid) into slang for meeting/seeing/being-run-over-by a celebrity. Preferrably it should be a B-list celeb, and even "meeting" them third-hand qualifies ("my sister's boyfriend ran into Siegfriend and Roy the other day!"). Lately, it seems I can't turn around without accumulating another "Lassie".

First off, I've been drinking and watching hockey with Bryce, a man who is not only the world's foremost expert on Bigfoot photography, but who also actually works for Jane Goodall. The one condition is related to the other, bizarrely enough. Being a famous scientist, and specifically an expert on primates, Goodall was once asked in a radio interview whether or not she believed in Bigfoot. She replied in some way that didn't completely and vehemently deny that Sasquatch is lumbering around somewhere in the Canadian woods, and because of that she was quickly turned into the darling of the Bigfoot "research" community. A great way to legimate any "sighting" would be to have Goodall endorse it as real, and before she could say "Yeti" twice she was being buried in blurry pictures and shaky-cam videos. Bryce, who was her webmaster at the time and as such the go-to guy for any digital audio/video work, got tapped as the man who should weed out the obvious fakes. So the way he tells it, he's probably the most experienced man in the whole wide world when it comes to identifying Abominable Snowmen -- or rather fraudulent versions of the same.
As an aside, it took me quite a while to figure out who his boss actually was. He'd just mention a "Jane", who did some sort of charity work, but that didn't exactly register as unusual. However, phrases like "She used to work for National Geographic: they needed someone who looked cute in a pair of shorts on TV" and "It's amazing how human those chimps seem" started to make the rest of us a bit suspicious, and eventually it all came together. Bryce is still fighting the good fight for both animals and people online, by the way -- check out the Jane Goodall Institute Community for Social Change.

Second up to bat is someone who's more legitimately famous on his own... but only if you're a climber. And possibly only if you're a climber with a perverse fetish for climbing the man-eating offwidth cracks. Bob Scarpelli's fame is steadily morphing from legend into myth in Wyoming, and I'd bet my bottom dollar that his reputation as a fearsome crack climber extends all over the Front Range. He's spent better than 40 years climbing at Vedauwoo, and what he doesn't know about the intricacies of jamming body parts into rock isn't worth knowing. He's also almost inhumanly strong, especially for his size (he's my weight but six inches shorter), and seems to be one of these Old Hard Men who just get tougher with age. The gigantic hands that are attached to his tree-trunk-sized arms don't exactly hurt him, either -- he can fist jam what us mortals need to shove two hands and a knee into. I was out with Jen (more on her below) and him one fine Saturday, and got absolutely schooled on their warmups. But I probably learned more that day than in the whole previous season, and it's inspiring to watch him go. He's twice my age, but somehow he's mastered the art of just flowing -- seemlingly without effort -- up sections of rock that either spit me off immediately or eat whole pounds of my flesh on every attempt. I've got something to shoot for now...

Descending into not-even-C-list-celebrity, I've started climbing with Tom and Jen. Both of them achieved some sort of fame-by-proxy about two years back, with an article by Pete Takeda in Alpinist about climbing with Scarpelli in Vedauwoo, and a number of very nice photos by Greg Epperson. I actually read the article prior to moving here, and quite enjoyed it, but I certainly didn't recognize either Tom or Jen from their descriptions in Takeda's fine piece of prose. Tell me, does this look like someone who "mixes the physique and dark good-looks of Franco Colombo and a PhD intellect"?



On the other hand, I do buy his characterization of Jen as "cute spunky lawyer [...] who herself uses language that would make a sailor blush". Indeed, she's by far the most foul-mouthed woman I've ever met -- and a good friend and amazing climber:



As usual, I don't have any pictures of myself doing anything particularly heroic -- I can't very well take them myself, and my belayers are blessedly concentrated on keeping my fat ass off the ground. Possibly my greatest achievement so far this season has been learning how to really tape my hands, although it hasn't stopped me from donating more and more blood:



With my shiny new tape job, I've managed to pick off some Vedauwoo classics in the moderate range, including Plumb Line and Lower Progressive:





Those climbs aren't long, but they are "more deceptive than imposing", as Takeda puts it. I've also flailed about on some harder stuff, like Beer Crack:



But of course, post-climbing beers are almost the best part of the day, regardless of whether you sent or not:



With these people sheparding my ass around the three-star climbs of Vedauwoo, and providing motivational speeches like "You don't get any beer if you fall off this, doofus" and "Oooh, is your vagina hurting a little bit?", I'm sure to improve by leaps and bounds this season. Now, if the goddamn snow would just stop falling...

Climbing on a bunch of Red Rocks

So, as I said, I went off to the desert to climb for a week just recently. It's Spring Break here in the US, and in lieu of heavy drinking on the beach (the preferred Spring Break activity of college students all over America) I'd decided to go climbing. The initial plan was to go to Indian Creek and get spanked on endless splitter cracks, but with one thing and the other we decided to go off to Red Rocks instead. Sitting just 20 minutes outside of Las Vegas, the sandstone canyons have a seemlingly infinite supply of long moderate routes. This is mostly thanks to the fairly forgiving angle of the rock, and the amazing prevalence of small but positive holds all over it. Via some unknown mechanism (actually consulted a geologist on this), a very hard black patina forms over the relatively fragile sandstone, and after erosion removes the underlying layer, you end up with walls that are absolutely peppered with holds for hands and feet:



So, having picked a destination and simultaneously acquired some partners (Anneka's friends Kyle and Katie were keen to go), we took off. And so I was introduced to the American take on driving long distances: Just Fucking Do It. Kyle got in the driver's seat, and proceeded to drive 10+ hours, stopping only for food and gas every so often, through this:



Personally, I would've fallen asleep after just a couple of hours of monotony like that, but he figures it's pretty relaxing. To each his own, I suppose, and since we started at 5 PM it was a blessing that he could just keep going. We finally arrived at the campground to the welcome sight of sunrise:



(Not surprisingly, there's a lot of climbing narrative ahead. If words like "runout" or "crimping" mean nothing to you, skip ahead quite a few pages to descriptions of interesting people and odd desert landscapes)

After breakfast and a bit of a rest, we figured we might need some practice on this type of rock before doing any longer climbs, so we headed off to an easily accessed spot -- the Black Corridor. Of course, since it was sport climbing, and on a Saturday, and a short hike in, the rest of creation was there as well:



Fighting our way through crossed topropes, annoying dogs and hangdogging neophytes, we found a somewhat calmer corner of the crag and set up shop. The climbing style was unfamiliar at first, despite some previous experience with sandstone, but after I recognized that this was just like the indoor wall the moves started coming together. The exertion got me pretty hungry, but fortunately our Sherpa had portered in pounds and pounds of food:



We proceeded back to camp after the crimping orgy, slightly bleary-eyed from being awake 30+ hours, and started making plans for the next few days. Anneka and I had our sights set on Epinephrine (5.9): a gargantuan route, rising some 1600 feet or 15 pitches over the canyon floor, with 600 feet of sustained chimneying as the crux. Three things about it had us a bit worried: our collective capability to climb 5.9 chimney for ever and ever, beating the crowds to the start (it's a hugely popular climb) and being able to go fast enough to descend before dark. Issues one and three could be tackled by doing a similar climb as practice beforehand, and issue number two could at least be mitigated by checking how long the approach would take us. We picked Beulah's Book as the practice climb, and decided to do the approach hike on a rest day before launching for real. Satisfied with our well-laid plans, we went to sleep and... woke up freezing our asses off:



It had actually contrived to snow in the morning -- what the hell? Aren't deserts sweltering hot and arid? Anyway, since climbing on wet sandstone is a no-no (it breaks, apparently) we were officially on a Rest Day. Timing the approach hike into Black Velvet Canyon (home of Epinephrine) seemed like a productive use of our time, and after putting on every shred of spare clothing we went off to look for it. Kyle again displayed near-magical aptitude for driving on the way in, navigating his ungainly Honda Element over terrain that was only considered a road by courtesy. The actual hike into the canyon turned out to be rather steeper than expected, featuring either 5.7/5.9 chimney moves or an easier but more exposed slab climb:



Once the Black Velvet Wall and Epinephrine came into view, we were pretty awed/scared/enthusiastic:



Indeed, the climb itself looked pretty tasty on closer inspection. This is the crux part: ascending the Black Tower via those chimneys on the right side. For scale, those cracks are back-to-toe width, and the rest of the climb is the equivalent of another three pictures going upward:



After more gawking, we reversed the approach and headed on back to camp to drink beer and eat stir fry. The weather cleared, and the next morning dawned a brilliant blue. Katie and Kyle went sport climbing, and Anneka and I could at last have a whack at our Epinephrine-simulator: Beulah's Book (5.9) into Solar Slab (5.6). Linking those two would tell us if we had The Right Stuff for the more serious climb, and if we could go fast enough to finish it. We miserably failed on beating the crowds to the climb, though: when we arrived at the base there were already numerous parties on the wall, with one directly ahead of us and several others racing toward the base of Solar Slab. When we could finally start climbing Anneka polished off the initial pitch con gusto, while I mostly suffered on the way up. Trad climbing always scares me shitless before I've gotten to place a few pieces on the sharp end, and the steepness of the first pitch was kind of a kick in the teeth. Anneka was mighty psyched, though, so that was good:



I'd lobbied for leading the second pitch, which had a suitably bomb-bay chimney (I like those) narrowing into off-width (not bad) and what later proved to be a sustained layback (I hate that):



After much grunting, cursing and groaning I got up to the second belay stance and had a nice conversation with one half of the party ahead of us. I like talking to Old Climbers -- they always have good stories to tell, for one, and they're usually a gold mine for slightly sandbagged beta. Meanwhile Anneka battled the chimney tooth and nail, after discovering that she was too short to just grunt it out in traditional style. After applying some ingenuity to the problem, she continued upward and joined me at the belay. She was significantly happier about the next pitch: an vast sea of chickenheads and little knobs, offering fantastic footholds but almost no protection. With the rope dangling uselessly beneath her, she soon disappeared from view and hit the top of the climb. Having a bit of a break for lunch in the sun was pretty darn sweet:



As we ambled up to the start of Solar Slab, we noticed climbers crawling all over it. There looked to be a party on every pitch, and since all three lower climbs (including ours) fed into the same starting crack, there was a massive pile-up of people on the route. Eventually I jumped on lead and carefully toed my way up the sandstone knobs (breaking one and almost soiling myself in the process), only to discover that there was even a queue to get down from the damn thing. After checking the length of the shadows, the topo, the rappel route and our combined cojones, we decided to bail. Not a moment too soon, either -- descending took forever, with slow-ass parties ahead and huge crowds on the ledges below. We even contemplated downclimbing past all these people, but quickly came to the realization that having someone rappel onto your head could unnerve even the calmest soloist. A short eternity later, we were back at camp and the beer cooler again.

So, now came Decision Time: could we reliably climb Epinephrine within, say, 12 hours and avoid getting benighted on the descent? The day's experience suggested a firm "NO" was the answer -- I could probably grunt through those chimneys, but not very quickly, and Anneka could be SOL if they turned really wide. And we weren't exactly flying upward on the slabs either, so after much deliberation we decided to abstain. Sucks, but sucks less than spending the night hanging in your harness.

The following day we needed to figure out something to do instead of Epinephrine. Fortunately there are masses of other five-star routes, and Lotta Balls (5.8+) in First Creek Canyon jumped out at us. That canyon also held a good selection of routes for Kyle and Katie (who had very little trad gear), so we all went out there together. As Anneka and I racked up at the base, I remembered reading about the climb online before going, and what stuck in my mind was that the second pitch was supposed to be a real horror-show mentally: balancy climbing on what amounted to small black marbles, far above the measly two bolts provided. Having acquired very little footwork in my years of climbing, and being a bit of a sneaky bastard, I suckered Anneka into playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors" for the privilege of not leading it. She noticed that some foul play was up, but went along with the idea... and lost. I gleefully cast off onto the climb -- a lovely mix of blocks, cracks, dihedrals and flakes. When time came to lead the Balls pitch, she wasn't too freaking happy about life in general:



Having some mercy in me I gave her my fleece (it was cold in the shade) and what encouragement I could offer before she took off. But as usual there was nothing to worry about -- she's sure-footed as a mountain goat and has a sack twice the size of mine (metaphorically speaking), and predictably her lead went off without a hitch:



The rest of the climb was a hoot, with some easy chimney thrown in for dessert. Even the descent was fairly pleasant. Fifty-star route in my book.

Some time and a few short climbs later we got back to the parking lot, where Kyle and Katie had been waiting over three hours for us -- sorry, guys! Totally missed you going out. And then back to the beer cooler we went (notice a theme here?).

Thursday was to be the day of our Epic Ascent: a long Red Rocks route. Crimson Chrysalis (5.8) was reputedly one of the best and steepest climbs in that grade anywhere, and tagging the summit of a buttress was also quite appealing. Wise from our mistake on Solar Slab, we set the alarm to 3.30 AM and started the gruesome hike into Juniper Canyon way before dawn and the anticipated crowds:



Many miles of trail, switchbacks, bushwhacking and getting lost later, we got to the base of the climb as the sun came up and illuminated the first of several overhangs:



We ascended the initial crack system as the first party on the wall (hooray!) but soon had plenty of company. We let a Canadian team (more on them below) pass us while waiting on the one tiny ledge on the whole climb:



After nine pitches of mostly excellent climbing -- the first five are the real prize -- we tasted sweet success and even sweeter sunlight:



Then came lots and lots of rappelling, significantly speeded up by joining forces with two Canadian parties who had a great (if somewhat complicated) system for getting down fast. Not a single snagged rope in five raps, which is more than lucky in the Land of the Rope-Eating Flakes (read: Red Rocks). Overall it was a great experience: steep as anything, sustained, varied, tall, not too hard, and incredible views. The celebration beers back at camp had me almost entirely incapacitated, though, since I'd had all of two bagels and half a liter of water in 16 hours of hiking and climbing. I stumbled into the tent an exhausted but happy man and promptly started snoring.

The final day saw us doing some sport routes (Yours Truly seems to be getting some skills back after an almost wasted season), having a desperately needed shower and finishing off the hideous drive back home.

So, any highpoints of the trip except for climbing? Of course there were. While we never went into Vegas, we still met some interesting and funny people. It was a pleasure getting to know Kyle and Katie, for one. They're great company, fun to be around and enormously generous with their time, driving me and Anneka all across creation at all hours of the night. And they know to appreciate impressive rock, too:



We also kept running into Canadians -- how aboot that, eh? They seemed to be there at every turn. For instance, there was the lovely pilot-stewardess couple out of Quebec that we met going down from Solar Slab. Good climbers and interesting conversationalists. True, they didn't know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland, and couldn't believe English wasn't my country's native language (my accent is improving, it seems), but they had all kinds of good stories to kill time on the ledges. Snappy dressers, too:



Then there was Steve the Nutty Rope-Soloist. We ran into this guy on a wall with easier short climbs, where he was moving at less than snail's pace up an easy route. He was obviously sketched out as all hell, trying to get a nut in before his calves (and brains) gave out. After much talking to himself, his tiny dog at the base, his rack and lots of yelling "Whoops!", he finally got that nut in and finished the climb. Worryingly, the placement was absolute bunk and he couldn't even rappel without scaring himself. The ensuing conversation confirmed that he was a bit of an odd-ball, presumably in Vegas because all the other weird people have already gathered there. We left him and his strangely nervous pet (looked like it was about to shit itself) to their own devices, fervently hoping that he wouldn't jump on something bigger than half a pitch or harder than 5.5. Here he is, taking about an hour and a half to set up his anchor (base of the wall, slightly right of middle):



An altogether pleasant experience, on the other hand, was meeting five more Canadians on Crimson Chrysalis. They came out of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, home to 25,000 of 30,000 people living on an area the size of France. Courteous, funny and generous, they even offered us a ride back to the campground after they'd come up with (and executed) a splendid plan for descending the route quickly. In particular, Sean the Old Hardman was a cool guy. We sat around chatting for about an hour on the summit, and after we got down he offered to show us the trail back to the car. And then he went! The guy is easily the fastest hiker I have ever seen, more running down the trail than walking. There was no difference in speed depending on angle, terrain or even the existence of a trail at all. Most people bushwhack fairly slowly -- certainly slower than on trail -- but this guy would just accelerate into the shrub and break through. I guess I should've known what was up when he told me at the base that he'd done the approach in half the time we used. Though we tried to keep up with him on the way back, he left us about a mile behind in twenty minutes or so. Fortunately he slowed down to merely the fastest speed we could reliably maintain downhill when he saw that we were falling behind. Within a half-hour, we'd dropped 1000+ feet on rocky switchbacks and gotten back to the car -- even with a short stop for a splash in the creek! There's a Swedish word that applies here: "gubbseg". Translates roughly into "hardy as an old man", and he was obviously one of these people who age like oak (read: just gets tougher with time). And back in camp, he dropped by with some beer as thanks for letting him pass us on the climb. How cool is not that? Here he is to my right on the summit of Crimson Chrysalis, just looking mellow:



There were plenty of inanimate objects to look at in the desert, as well. We never saw much wildlife (the odd rabbit, heard some coyotes), but the vegetation is somewhat otherworldly to a boy from the spruce forests of Sweden. Take Joshua trees, for instance. It's hard to decide if it's a tree, a cactus, a palm, or something from Mars:



There was also plenty of cacti (painful to run into, lemme tell you), palms, odd shrubs and the like. And of course, any sandstone desert will provide beautiful contrast between rocks, sky and plants:



So, if you've made it this far, congrats! I'm about out of things to say, and pictures to show. Many thanks to Anneka for providing most of the imagery -- all but a handful of these shots were taken by her. I'll be back with a shorter (promise!) update eventually, unless the Work Monster eats me. Now, I have to go prep for tomorrow's climbing trip to Horsetooth Reservoir...