101 Things

By the time I actually put up my first trad lead as my very last climb of the weekend, it felt sort of underwhelming, considering that I was physically pretty worn out and mentally exhausted from all the other things I learned over two days in Squamish. Things like how to make TAPE GLOVES:

And setting up my own rappel without supervision, which TERRIFIES ME STILL:



Some sweet CRACK CLIMBING, which it turns out I think I LOVE:



And then after two solid days of climbing climbing climbing, which included following on my first clean 5.10a route plus following up a really burly 5.8 that made someone else cry, Eric and I set off to do my first trad lead climb up a 5.6 route named MCM. (We also did a mock lead on a 5.4 where I set as much protection as I could so he could check it out and make sure I wasn’t going to kill myself.) Here I am, properly gearing up and beering up:


And then uh, I fell on the crux about four times before I made it up, all exhausted and frustrated and angry about it. But my gear held! When Eric followed the route to double check my gear placement (pretty solid, thank you very much), he got to the crux and admitted that it was indeed a little spicy. And then he made a couple easy, graceful moves to fly right past it and I shot lasers from my eyes.



Hooray!



I am now prepared to officially declare this summer THE BEST SUMMER.

Already got pretty high hopes for fall and winter too. THE BEST LIFE.