Weather in the west has been a mess this year, and it’s changed a lot of climbers’ plans. Only four days before Jen and I were supposed to roll into Yosemite Valley it re-opened after closure due to heavy snowfall. The day after we left it closed again for flooding. Our timing turned out to be perfect in terms of being able to actually go there, but the result of all the snow and water was that almost everything long (read, the projects we wanted to attempt) was soaking wet.
But, there is a whole lot of rock in the Valley, so we turned our eyes mostly to the cragging down canyon and spent two weeks on beautiful granite with nearly perfect weather and only the occasional wet hand jam. Somewhere during this leg of the trip was the first time that I felt like I was actually climbing well in nearly two years. I hit that nice stride where I didn’t have to think about movement anymore, I just started to flow up the rock.
At the end of the week, Jen and I took a quick lap to Sickle ledge so I could get a quick benchmark about how I was doing compared to last fall. I was twice as fast as I was five months ago, which proved that even though I was probably climbing harder then, I’m climbing better now.
I was bummed to leave the Valley after all the progress that I had in the short amount of time there, and I wanted to do bigger things before we left. But I’m happy to have a good base back and a lot of granite in our future. I can’t wait to come back in the fall and put 7 months of straight climbing to use on these beautiful walls.
