For me its a required cycle, to preseve the delicate state of my own peace of mind. Like many of you I am sure, I require a steady diet of adventure to maintain my mental health.
Some of my undertakings are excruciatingly planned, huge missions with real dangers which take as much (or more) out of me as they give back. This one how ever was the polar opposite.. Lets head to TM for 10+ days and just have fun ticking stuff off our lists as we think of it... No real plan, no stress, just days of fun all blurring together.
Given the diversity of our lists we had everything from ice gear for an early season couloir run on the east side somewhere, to big wall stuff for a bake fest on El Cap... and everything in-between... ohh and of course some luxury car camping outfitting such as a bug hut for the picnic table, and full on grill for evening feasts... ;-)
There is nothing overly unique about our adventure.. It was just pure fun and joy in the mountains.. So this TR is simply an effort to share the stoke to get out and play!
Below is a photo tour of some of the stuff we climbed during our trip...
I have to rant about the next climb a little bit. For some time I had been wanting to do OZ on Drug Dome, and had not gotten to it.. Finally climbed it... and was elated to get it clean on-sight.. also it lives up to the hype... I think its probably the best 5.10 I have climbed anywhere.... super awesome!!
Next we were up for some solo alpine ridge climbing, and a chance to eyeball some couloir possibilities for later in the week. The alpine ridge solo'ing was AWESOME.. the condition of the couloir's, not so much! ;-)
The only hint of a bummer during our trip was bad weather coming in and hosing our rough idea at a plan to get on the Hulk for a few days... We ended up doing more cragging that we expected to, but it was still super fun, and we only managed to get rained on once.. ;-)
At the end of it all, we had real blast.. Weather kept us off some of the bigger stuff we had in mind like the Hulk and El Cap, but we climbed more stuff than I can even remember....
Awesome trip.. I hope the stoke is infectious!