Anatomy Of A Landing

I've written previously about the process of putting up new boulders at the lake. Often times it takes much more than just walking up to a problem, chalking up some holds and going to town. The Smooth Operator roof has been the object of interest so far this spring. In all I've been up to the project three times now. Once with Nic last year, once a few weeks ago to recheck it and see if it was worthwhile, and then this past Wednesday to attempt to fix the landing.

Over the course of almost 4 hours Katie and I were able to turn an unclimbable, spike filled landing:


Into something that was surprisingly flat and kind of perfect:


There was definitely a moment when both of us thought that we were hosed. One unruly boulder was holding up the whole show and until that one moved there wasn't much else we could do. Then, thanks to an unexpectedly perfect use of the pry bar, the boulder moved into an ideal place and the rest of the landing slowly clicked into position.

I've never had a landing switch personalities so quickly, going from completely stubborn and terrible to moving almost at will in a matter of minutes.

As it stands, the landing is better than I could have imagined and it's ready to get some effort. Light was dwindling fast and we had to leave but hopefully we'll get to try it this weekend. It looks incredibly hard and I'm always torn working on things like this because it seems so far above my head at this point that I don't see climbing it myself anytime soon. I could be very wrong though.

Either way, we have a cool, hard project at the lake over a good landing on cool holds. I hope people go up and try this one.

It was also my birthday this past tuesday.

Katie got me a naked lady mug:


And a box o files:


And a birthday fritter:


And new badminton shoes:


Oh, and Katie found a really old beer can up by the project. Fun:


That's all I got. Nic is coming down and doing a Five Ten Demo at the gym tonight from 6-10 or so. You guys should come try on rock climbing shoes. You can win something from Organic if you try on a pair. They're doing a raffle. Do it!

Who all is getting out this weekend??? Think we're gonna head up on Sunday.