Loompa Land

Just a quickie update from a nice session yesterday. We met up with Anne and Vera and took them around Loompa Land/Empty Space. On the way in Dobbe and Aaron yelled down to us from up on top of some mini bluff on the West Bluff. They'd apparently found some stuff and were going to meet us a bit later.

It sounded like what they found was fairly cool and semi terrifying. I think Aaron described it as "spicy".

Eventually all of us warmed up on Empty Space and I was reminded of how nice of a little area that place is. Such a good find from last year and I'm stunned it hasn't gotten more traffic. Great little moderate area that's "fairly" easy to pad up. The problems are all fun and it's really easy to connect these boulders to Anchorpoint and Half Dome/Dumpster. You can actually see the half dome boulder from the top of the Duke/Dutchess boulder.

After warming up and playing around on something far too short to warrant any attention at all, we went to the other lines in the area. The ladies to Loompaland and Aaron, Dobbe and I up to The Duke and The Dutchess. Aaron and Dobbe quickly did the Dutchess with Dobbe also doing the Duke on his second or third try. Aaron and I gave it a few more goes than that before finally grabbing the jug at the lip but we were both able to clean that one up as well.

After that we all kinda parted ways, Katie and I heading over to The Hipster and Tunder Tighs.

Katie gave the Hipster a number of solid efforts and after working out a good sequence came incredibly close to finishing it, falling off the last strenuous move 3-4 times in a row. Eventually though the boulder problem won and Katie left empty handed and extremely pumped.

We took a quick look at Tunder to see if we could come up with a sequence for her (she can't span the big move over the lip). I think we were able to come up with a couple of options and I'm excited to see her attempt to work it out. We also noticed an undercling a few inches below the right hand start pinch. Looks like someone has been using it as a right hand start hold. Seems like it might be a less powerful option for the first move or two. Not sure I could use it as it'd make the bump move even bigger, but for those of you with some longer arms it may be something to look at!

On the injury front I'm now into my third injury of the year, having hurt my knee last week while I was hiking around. I went to the Doc last Monday and it seems that I strained my MCL but it doesn't look like I did any damage thankfully.

My 13th year of climbing has started out incredibly odd as I've picked up a new injury each of the first three months. In all I've ended up taking off just as much time this year as I've actually spent climbing. It's frustrating but if nothing else it's done a nice job of getting me into a bit more of a training mode than usual. I've been forced to maximize the time I've been able to be active and I can say it's been a learning experience.

After I hurt my hamstring I took a bit of time off but when I came back I couldn't use my left leg at all, afraid I'd hurt it worse. I learned more about momentum in those 2-3 weeks than I have the past few years. It's really incredible what moves you can do when you truly force yourself into doing things a certain way.

I might write more on that later this week if I get motivated.

Hope some other people were able to get out this weekend. It was oddly humid and the trees are already budding. Cannot describe how depressing that is. I hope we get a couple days of below freezing temps to kill all that off for a bit.