101 Things

Not a Thing: Surprise! More climbing

The climbing class has been a little all-consuming thus far, and I think it is only going to get worse from here on out. I am sorry to everyone who has been trying to be friends with me who does not also climb mountains. We can be friends again in September.

Since the first and second outings, there have been three more, and here are some pictures of me doing some things my mom won’t like too much:

Leavenworth, Washington

Learning to rescue a fallen climber. I mostly learned that if you are climbing with me, you probably shouldn’t fall because what is even going on.

Smith Rock, Oregon
Site of my first lead fall onto gear! (Not this particular pitch, which I led just fine — no, I fell off an easier route the next day.) I hope you paid attention and learned how to rescue a fallen climber! After I finished the route, my belayer proudly told me it was his first time catching a lead fall so wait oh god what.

Squamish, British Columbia
Leading up the final route at the end of three days in Squamish, by far my favorite weekend of the class thus far. Previously, lead climbing has left me petrified in fear, even when I am standing still on a giant ledge, but I could somehow fall at any moment somehow aaaaah!!! I think in this picture I am talking to someone coming up a route off to my right, as though I was just strolling pleasantly along a sidewalk.

Here are some other things from last weekend in Squamish!

What fun is climbing if we are not also dancing? Anything to make this stupid runout slab climb more fun, I guess. (My favorite part of the route description: there is no pro on the slab so it doesn’t really matter if you have a belay.)

A problem that I sometimes have is that my skin is apparently made of paper.

I finally got a handful of 5.7 leads under my belt, and stared up at what was to be my first 5.8 lead just as it started to rain and we decided rapping back down was the prudent choice.

Just kidding, we love Squamish!

I think my least favorite place to climb thus far has been Smith Rock, and that is why I must go there again this weekend, and every weekend, until I get it right. Maybe if you don’t like blog posts about climbing you should come back in September, I am really very sorry about all of this.

3 days ago

Not a Thing: Dusk Patrol

Way back in December, Eric and I climbed The Tooth. On our hike back out to the parking lot, the snow had softened up but maintained a layer of thin ice over the top. I punched through and sank in with every step, and then I’d pitch forward and bruise my shins on the icy layer. I think we were about a half an hour into the descent when I gave up and flopped down on the snow to announce that everything was terrible. And at that exact moment, three backcountry skiers glided gracefully past us, oblivious to our frustrations.

I have to learn to do that, I hissed. And so the next day I tried to learn to do that, but I gave myself a black eye instead, whoops. But then I got my act together and started thinking about some backcountry skiing, which is the whole reason I have been doing any of this anyway. This is how ridiculous my life has become: I want to climb mountains but I’ve decided it would be a lot easier if I could just ski out to them and then ski back to the car, so I learned to ski.

Well, I learned how to ski downhill, but learning to ski uphill is another thing entirely, another thing requiring another set of expensive equipment I’ve been accumulating via Craigslist. (Related: I need a garage.) It was a sunny 74 degrees when I left work in Seattle this week, so what better time to go skiing? Except, oh shit, the chair lifts stopped running last month! WHAT TO DO.

After a short hike through a swamp, we were at the bottom of one of the first black diamonds I skied this winter. It looks a little sadder now, I’ll admit.

Aaaaaaand here I am at the top! I have been sick with a cold for the past couple of weeks, which meant my ears were so stuffed up that when I plodded a thousand feet up the hill in a desperate race against the sunset, it was VERY LOUD inside my own skull, what with all the wheezing. I think I am maybe crying a little in this picture. Not a moment to spare as far as the sunset goes, as you can see.

Oh, thank goodness someone was sensible enough to bring booze.
Thank goodness I am so sensible.

To mountains! I love them.

While I drove home, Eric kept patting my leg and telling me how proud he was, and how much I learned this year. And good grief, it is true. A few weeks ago, we went to Leavenworth and I led the very first pitch I ever climbed on top rope, less than a year before. And now I am leading routes. Six months ago, I had never gone downhill skiing in my life, and now I am trudging up black diamonds so I can ski back down them, and even that is just training for skiing down mountains with no chairlifts at all. PRETTY GOOD YEAR, I should say.

Not that we are resting on these laurels for even a minute, of course! If you will excuse me, I now have to get in my car and drive to Canada so I can climb on some Canadian rocks and up my game once again.

1 week ago

Not a Thing: Climb at Vantage (and also Leavenworth)

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m taking another climbing class this year, and this one is a little more time-intensive and attention-intensive and stress-intensive than the one I took last year. The all-weekend-long outings are each spaced a couple weeks apart, but the class lasts all spring and summer (fully six months), and the weekends not spent on an outing are generally spent making sure I’m in shape for the next outing. I’ve had three weekends off so far, and one was spent at a yoga retreat with my hippie brother. The other two weekends have been spent… climbing.

I’d never been climbing at Vantage before this year, but it is in the eastern Washington desert and it is generally warm and sunny even when Seattle is gray and dreary. Too bad I showed up on day two of a two-day hangover. Oh well, at least I got one piece of gear in the wall on a route that took no less than four of us to finish. Like idiots. Idiots who, nonetheless, at least look awesome:

Well. My first day pulling on real rock this year shook my confidence a little bit. So Eric very kindly took me out the following week to Leavenworth* to help me get my head back in the game. There were, again, some hangover issues, though at least I was not the one suffering this particular weekend.

*My parents came to visit me a few years ago, before I climbed, and we went to Leavenworth because it is a cute little mountain tourist town made to look like a village in the Bavarian Alps where you can waste a day eating sausages and trying on silly hats. Now whenever I tell my mom I’m spending a weekend climbing in Leavenworth, she says, “Oh! That weird town!”

Leavenworth climbing involves a lot of routes on granite slabs. These routes always entertain me because while I’m on them they are terrifying and feel fairly vertical (but also sloped enough to keep me scared I will scrape off all of my skin if I fall), but then I look at pictures later and it looks like I could have curled up and taken a nap in the sun if I got tired of just walking up the face of the rock. Oh, come on, how could this have been scary:

Last week I got teased about how obviously shiny and new my rope was. That’s not gonna be a problem anymore, now that I took it out without a proper rope bag to protect it. Oops.

There hasn’t been a lot of time spent doing things lately, in part owing to the climbing, and in part because what things I have tried to do have failed rather spectacularly. Let’s not talk about the Hollandaise sauce incident, thank you. It is sometimes galling that I wrote a huge list of goals before I really climbed very much, since my goals have now been reset to revolve entirely around climbing. On the other hand, I think it is good for me to be forced to maintain a piece of myself — the part that draws comics and sews dresses and cooks complicated things — that would be entirely overwritten if I weren’t watchful.

1 month ago

Thing #52: Knit a scarf - continental style

There are two styles of knitting, English and continental. During my senior year of college, having already been accepted to grad schools, I taught myself to knit instead of writing any final papers or studying for final exams, and I taught myself the English style because that’s what came first in the book I was using.

Many knitters argue that the continental style is faster and therefore better, and I am a person who cannot stand knowing that other people might be better at something than I am. I’ve been trying to learn the continental style for years, but it is maddening to sit down and fumble clumsily with knitting needles again when I already know how to knit and I am very good at it. So I figured if I forced myself to struggle through an entire scarf using the continental style, I’d get the muscle memory down by the end of it and be adept at both knitting styles. And hey! It worked!

(previously)

THING #52: DONE. (33/101)

1 month ago

Thing #35: Sleep in a snow cave

I am terribly afraid of heights. When people find out I climb, they like to make lame jokes about what a terrible sport I’ve chosen, because well, they are missing the whole point. But this weekend I got to rest easy because our climbing class was going on the snow outing, which doesn’t really involve any heights at all, just a bunch of floundering around in deep snow in the middle of a winter storm advisory, that’s all.

Also, we had to sleep in a snow cave.

Also, I am rather claustrophobic.

Wait, wait. That picture makes the cave look almost spacious! In reality, it felt more like this every time I had to put clothing on or take clothing off or get into my sleeping bag or get out of my sleeping bag or sit up or move at all or think about things:

Hello and welcome to my tiny home! We took this picture in the morning, after clearing out nearly a foot of fresh powder that had accumulated during the night:

I was really excited to sleep in a snow cave — how exotic! — but I was also worried about feeling claustrophobic and worried about the snow collapsing on me during the night. I had a lot of anxiety dreams last week, knowing this was coming.

But then… I got the best night of backcountry sleep I’ve ever had! I think my brand-new sleeping pad was actually more comfortable than my bed back in Seattle, and everything stayed warm and dry. (Almost 20% of my pack weight on this trip was feathers. Geese know what is up.) It also stays surprisingly light inside the cave at night — even the slightest bit of light gets reflected in and around the cave by the super-reflective snow walls and ceiling. It is really only the three hours my cave-roommate and I spent digging into a wet snowbank on Saturday afternoon that keeps me from sleeping in a snow cave every chance I get.

THING #35: DONE. (32/101)

1 month ago -

Thing #77: Draw 50 pages of comics

THING #77: STILL IN PROGRESS. (2/50)

(previously)

2 months ago -

Thing #57: Brew ginger beer

My friend Emily has made occasional appearances here, since she is my Most Favored Weekend Adventure Partner (The One Who Won’t Make Out With Me), and she also spends a couple evenings a week at the gym with me. One night at the gym, she mentioned that she had been inspired to make a list of things of her own. We chatted about our climbing goals, many of which are predictably overlapping. And then, as she started up a route, she casually mentioned that she wanted to make ginger beer.

Well, that overlap was less predictable.

LET’S DO IT.

We used this recipe, which is frustratingly imprecise as far as how much yeast to use, but even America’s Test Kitchen concurred with that recipe, so we figured it had to be a winner. But if we were wrong, we would potentially have exploding glass bottles on our hands. In our hands. In everything. So we perhaps went a bit too conservative on the yeast, and 48 hours later had lovely glass bottles of completely flat ginger… drink. We added rum to soothe our disappointment.

Attempt number two involved the Mr. Beer Deluxe Bottling System, which is… a box of plastic bottles and caps. If you use plastic bottles, you can squeeze them occasionally to make sure they are carbonated, and even if they end up over-carbonated, you risk only a giant, sticky mess, not a giant, sticky mess plus flying glass shards.

Success!

THING #57: DONE. (31/101).

2 months ago

Not a Thing: Horsethief Butte Outing

Oh hello there, it is that time of year when I do scary things again! I am taking another climbing class this year in an effort to make my mother even more nervous about my personal well being. The first outing was last weekend, to Horsethief Butte in southern Washington. It was one half review of practical skills, one half neato whizbang climbing tricks, which is of course the half I am going to tell you about.

Here’s me on my first big wall aid climb! It took me about a half hour to awkwardly climb up all of fifteen feet. Uh, I’m not sure I like aid climbing very much.

And then I did the Tyrolean traverse, which looks much scarier than it actually is. (Really, Mom.) On the other hand, I think two trips across fulfilled my quota of ab exercises for the month.

I wasn’t convinced I liked climbing all that much when I took a mountaineering class a year ago. I have been trying to figure out exactly when I made a fairly extreme about-face, and I guess it was probably around the time I did my first multipitch alpine climb, late last July. Eric and I even had a recent conversation about it — I said I wouldn’t have predicted I’d get this into climbing, he said he wouldn’t have predicted it either. But, well, here we are! Climbing.

2 months ago

Thing #86: Get back to running weight

Uh, here is the thing where my list veers dangerously close to a lame new year’s resolution.

My brother and I ran a marathon a couple years ago. Well, ran might be a bit too optimistic a verb, but we did finish a marathon. Unfortunately, I injured myself so badly around mile #20 that a medic asked me if I wanted help off the course, my pitiful limp was so noticeable by the time I reached the final mile. And then… I couldn’t run more than a half mile for the next two years without enduring a pain in my hip for the next week so bad it made me cry. But! I kept eating as though I was logging 20-30 miles a week, and, well.

THE EVOLUTION OF MY PANTS:
Here is me climbing in Leavenworth last May, wearing some pants I bought the night before. Getting them on in the dressing room took a little wriggling, at the time.

And then here I am back in Leavenworth in October, able to fit a camera in the pocket on the side of my leg, unable to wear those pants without a piece of my climbing webbing substituted for a belt.

Last night I tried those same pants on, looked in a mirror at how sadly sagging they were, and headed off to the store to get new pants in advance of this weekend’s climbing plans.

Climbing is awesome, you guys. I am also a whole lot more muscular than the last time I was at this weight.

Climbing is awesome, you guys.

THING #86: DONE. (30/101)

2 months ago

Thing #20: Climb a 5.11 gym route

So perhaps there have been some rumors that my gym has let its ratings get a little soft. And if I am perfectly honest, that is probably the only good explanation for how I could take nearly two months off from regular climbing workouts and then suddenly nail down a 5.11a route.

To be fair, I have seen a few people struggle with this one more than me, and it seems to be the lucky route that is set for my particular taste in high-step moves that require abnormally flexible hips.

(I like the pink routes best.)
Anyway, the index card on my wall doesn’t care. The index card says 5.11, and I have fulfilled my promise to the index card.

THING #20: DONE. (29/101)

2 months ago