Cobble-rific

We're back from Maple Canyon, Utah! What can I say, we've been there quite a few times before, and once again it was great. The weather cooled as the days went by, with scattered thundershowers here and there. It's been known that Maple Canyon's sport climbing routes are "soft" on the ratings; however, there are a number of very good climbs. Even though Jen and Wendy (both have "spaz" or "spaaz" in their urls, kinda interesting) will likely be the only ones who'll understand what I'm talking about, I'll just mention that I led the following routes: onsight 10b, 10d, 11b, 11d; redpoint warmup 10s, 11c, 12a, 12b. BF redpointed his projects, a 12b (same one I did) and a 12d that had one of those make-or-break moves at the top. All the climbs were looong, between 50 and 90 feet high. Since we'll be returning in 4 weeks (just in time to see the leaves change color), my goal will be to increase my power endurance. I was tired half the time from all the hiking and climbing!

Of course, I took pictures. It was so frickin' gorgeous, I just stared. Didn't knit a damn thing. Margene, how do you do it?

Pretty blue flowers.

And blue berries. I have no idea what they were, but the Resident Mouse seemed to like them.

We caught this beautiful rainbow after a particularly heavy rain. It must be all that expanse of sky and land, the colors were brilliant.

Sunsets, whatever we saw of them, weren't too bad either.

Here's a closeup of the rock we were climbing on: basically river rock in a hardened mud matrix. Note the American Indian paintings: these were fenced-off in the Left Fork hiking/climbing area. It's a hand at the top right, some type of magic symbol on the bottom left.

Friend of ours on a long route that starts off vertically, traverses up through a roof (very, very burly) and then up the rest of the cave. Nail-bitingly good climbing! And yes, he finally redpointed the route after 6 or 7 tries.

A very rare picture of BF (okay, it's a stretch), who got soaked in the rain while climbing one of the routes on the right. It just so happened that we were on *the* route that got wet during the rain. Of course.

And finally, me getting friendly with the local bear in Park City. It's a nice little town, a tad too commercial for us. All the magazines and papers I looked through advertised all these housing communities, and the stores on Main Street were either gift shops or restaurants. Where's the substance? I've seen the transformation of small towns like Big Bear and Mammoth into overpriced developments (back in the day when I used to snowboard and traveled often to those places), so I was a bit disappointed knowing Park City's future. *Others* may disagree.

Anyway. Next post I'll be back to knitted content. Those socks!

Blogworthy:
◊ This cool ceramic egg holder, for a dozen eggs. Interestingly enough, if you get brown eggs and white eggs, you could play tic-tac-toe. That was BF's suggestion, not mine.
◊ I was just talking to a friend that Patagonia should redesign their site, and guess what: they did.
◊ Speaking of the company Patagonia, you may or may not recall that one of its "ambassadors" Dean Potter climbed the Delicate Arch. I find it particularly sad that Potter found a loophole in the National Park Service rules to climb one of the state's most recognized natural features (photo here). Can't he at least say sorry? And what is Patagonia, leader of environmental activism, doing about this?