Rock Climbing for the first time in 3 years - Pics/GIF/Story

Well, belaying, cleaning, and hanging out on the portaledge, but still furthering the route and now a new anchor is installed.

After the drive in we reached the campsite and found the cows had been making it their home for nearly 2 weeks. There are allotments given for ranchers to run cattle in this part of the Colville National Forest so that meant a large number of "gifts" plopped willy nilly all over the ground. They had decimated the grass in most all accessible areas and had started working on the shrubs and under growth.

We packed up and hiked to the top of the cliff and rappelled to the base. The bottom of the wall is quite over grown so it made hiking around a bit difficult. We got to the base of the route and got geared up. Art lead up the first short pitch to the first anchors and fixed the line so I could clean the gear. While I cleaned he hauled the haulbag and portaledge up to the anchors.

I was pretty stoked to get my ascenders/jumars onto rope again. It felt nice and natural and I started running up the line quite quickly, almost automatically. Art had to tell me to slow down so he could get a few pictures, (which I will get later). I wore my back pack for this part up to the anchor, mostly as a small amount of training even though it was only 10 lbs, still training is training.

At the anchors we setup the double portaledge and hung out for a little while, ate, drank a beer, enjoyed the sights, and bs'd. You can see we weren't super far off the base of the wall but the rock is up higher so the valley below makes it feel like we were higher off the ground. The overhanging roof of rock provided a nice bit of shade and a breeze came up.

On the portaledge I had a visit from an American Hover Fly - Metasyrphus americanus.

A panorama of the view from the portaledge.

Art stepping off the anchor onto his first piece on the new part of the route. It is a short section that follows under the roof to an alcove. He put in a 2 bolt anchor in the alcove as that is the anchor for 2 routes below that follow a crack straight to the alcove.

Once the anchor was in I cleaned the 2nd section and then rappelled straight to the ground. I then jugged back up to the portaledge, just after I arrived Art was rappelling back down to the ledge and was trying to traverse across the rock. He got close but I had to help pull him onto the ledge as he kept letting letting rope through his rappel device. Funny to be doing things like that 60 feet off the ground, but it is still fun.

We gathered things up and descended to the base where we had to coil 3 ropes. Packing everything up and with the portaledge in its bag, over my shoulders - behind my head - on top of my pack parallel to my arm span, we hiked up the hillside next to the cliff. A fairly strenuous hike when not carrying anything becomes quite difficult when loaded down. The pine needles made for some pretty treacherous steps and a few times it was 2 steps forwards, slide backwards 3 steps. We finally got back to the truck and campsite around 7:30 pm.

Beer, food, setting up tents, then a small fire to keep the bugs and cows at bay.

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The next morning the thunderstorms rolled through. You can read about it in this post with a pretty cool GIF.

Sun, Rain, Forest, at once at 7 am this morning - GIF

You can see pictures of some of the rock moss that I found while wandering the forest in this post.

Rock Moss in the middle of the forest

Camera: Motorola Droid phone

Processed with: Photoshop CS6

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You can read my blog series here:

Being a Father and a Farmer can be a struggle	Gardener Gripe - #gardenergripe
Time	#1.0 - Back Pain
Expectations	#2.0 - Weeds
	#3.0 - Pests - Gophers

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Fleming Family Farm
FLEMING FAMILY FARM, LLC
Sustainable & Organic Methods | Heirloom Produce

All images are original works of Fleming Family Farm unless otherwise notated and credited.

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