Well, that went by fast

Last week saw me passing three milestones of my time here in Laramie: the one-year anniversary of my moving here, the Official End of Summer and the purchase of my very own automobile. Kind of a big week, in retrospect, although it certainly didn't feel like it at the time.

So, my first year living in Laramie and going to UW is done. Funny, doesn't quite feel like a whole year has come and gone. I can still vividly remember arriving, amazed at the tiny-ness of the town, out of breath (the altitude!) and fairly disoriented after the long flight. Reading my blog entry from one week after arrival, it seems like I was both stressed and pretty happy all at once. In a way, that hasn't changed that much: I still enjoy the hell out of living here, and there's still a lot going on. Between the excellent climbing, the beautiful surroundings (saw one of the prettiest sunsets of my life yesterday), the difficult-but-interesting research and what turned out to be an interesting night life, I'm both busy and entertained. Can't really ask for much more than that.

It's also almost exactly a year since I met Joe, who's probably the very first friend I made in Laramie. He's also my roommate since a few months back, and very handy to have around the house. For instance, he's always ready to go to war to protect our beloved garage from insect invasion:



But I think he's kinda lost it when it comes to yard maintainence, though: there ain't no grass, Joe!



Summer has also come and gone. If you count from the last snows (June 11) to the first week of sub-freezing temperatures at night and constant rain (August 11-17), it worked out to exactly two months. They were two absolutely gorgeous months, though, with possibly the best summer weather I've ever experienced and the best climbing season I've ever had. But it's over, or at least heading that way. The sun is now solely responsible for all warmth, nights are getting toward frosty, and you can smell the autumn in the air. You know that crisp, slightly moist, smell of dying vegetation? Yeah, that one. Although there will be many fine warm days to come - we were up past 80 F again yesterday - summer is for all intents and purposes finito. Time to start heading to Lander, Fremont Canyon, Colorado and the deserts of the south to keep the climbing season going. It's looking pretty grim around here:



Buying a car is something I've been thinking about for quite some time - since, say, September last year. I'd occasionally go into Car Search Mode and spend a week or so checking out the local used car market, and inevitably be severely disappointed. Laramie isn't big enough to produce that many used cars (imagine going shopping for one in Knivsta for comparison), and most of them are of the Gigantic Gas Guzzling Truck variety. I was on the lookout for something small, Japanese and cheap, which turned out to be quite the elusive objective. Last week I finally broke down and decided to just buy something that would keep rolling for a little while. I spent some time scouring craigslist and the local classifieds before heading down to Fort Collins, which is about the size of my home town Uppsala. After a brief search and some very tasty sandwiches, I came upon this beauty:



A mid-nineties Toyota Camry sounded like a good idea in general, and after a cursory inspection and some slight bargaining I closed the deal - much to Amanda's shock and dismay. A multi-thousand dollar "impulse buy" was a bit beyond what she considered sane, but I hate shopping and was most pleased to have concluded the painful task of finding an automobile. The seller drove it up here on Monday, and I can see it parked outside my house from where I'm sitting right now. The car seemed eerily familiar to me, but I couldn't place it until my dad reminded me that a station wagon Camry had been his first company car sometime in the early nineties. I mostly remember it for being light blue (a nice color) and having the awesomely cool power windows. So now my horizons have widened about 1000% and I can drive to... well, not much, actually, since Wyoming is mostly empty, but nonetheless. I celebrated by driving to Cheyenne along scenic Happy Jack Road and having Korean for dinner (not available in Laramie). Life's looking up, or at least it's looking faster. And look what else I found in Fort Collins!



And as usual, I've been climbing. Not that much lately, given the weather and other committments, but progress has been pretty steady this season. I'm bleeding less and less, which is either a sign that I'm getting better (probably) or just not trying as hard (also likely). Pete Takeda, professional climber/author/funny fucker, came up to visit after a lengthy period of injury. He started out pretty skinny, which helped on the finger cracks, and he's even thinner now. Bob Scarpelli obviously took the other approach:



Other than that, nothing much to report. The semester starts again in about a week, and if I play my cards right I should be able to get out of taking classes this semester, greatly enhancing my scientific productivity and reducing my irritation about wasted time by up to 235%. Campus should also be inundated with undergrads, now mostly born in the 90's, presumably not knowing shit about shit. And overcrowding my favorite bars. Why, oh why couldn't summer have lasted a bit longer?

New things are good things

I've always been easily bored. As a kid I must've played a dozen sports, but not a one of them held my attention for very long - a few years at best, and I certainly never rose above a medium skill level in any of them. Later on, I traveled a bunch, and over the last few years I've picked up my bags and moved - occasionally to other continents - every so often, in order to keep things fresh. The whole switch-cities-every-six-months schtick is getting old, but going new places and seeing new sights never ceases to fascinate me. A good friend once characterized this state of mind as being an "upplevelse-hora", but I'm not sure I'd go quite that far... Recently I've moved (but only a few blocks!) into a new house, taken my first steps into Rocky Mountain National Park, and acquired yet another driver's license.

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...

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.