Alright, so one of my favorite things about the Taco is the TR's. Now that there is this new handy interface for making them, I suppose I no longer have a reason to lurk. So, here is a short TR from a little climbing up at Lumpy yesterday.

We rolled up to the TH at an embarrassingly late time of 9 pm but were surprised to find that we were only the fourth car. Gotta love Lumpy on a September weekday.

The goal of the day was Hiatus, a sweet 3 pitch 5.7 up on the left book that neither of us had been on. The aspens right now are really starting to show their fall colors, giving us something to enjoy on the approach.
Remember the blues skies in the picture above as this will come up shortly. The approach was the typical Lumpy lung busting, thigh swelling ordeal. We managed a respectable 45 minutes, passing a party of 3 along the way. The weather was generally sunny, cool and extremely gusty.

At the base of the route we racked up as the wind picked up. We were going to swing leads with Brent taking the middle pitch. Just as we were getting ready to cast off into the great unknown, Colorado did it's thing and the sunny blue skies were replaced with rain/snow.
After hemming and hawing at the base for a bit we finally decided to gun it, hoping that this was a typical 10 minute Colorado storm and not the big one predicted to hit later in the day. So, I set off in a heavy winds and a light rain/snow.

Pitch one starts out easy but quickly ramps up to it's 7+ grade with some exciting movement across slabs between cracks. Gear was adequate but not abundant. You end up on a ledge system with a tree after about 150 feet. Here is Brent pulling around the roof on P1.

We quickly reracked on the ledge. I could tell that Brent was not as pumped to lead the second pitch as he was during the approach. He is relatively new to trad leading and plus he fell twice on the first pitch, which is pretty unusual. But he manned up and took his lead without comment. Here is Brent ready to cast off onto p2. Super pumped!!
P2 consisted of a left facing dihedral with a crack that starts out wide and the peters down to nothing, at which point you strike out onto the slabs and gun for a new crack. Here is Brent ripping it up.
Did I mention that it was effing cold? I had the whole body shivers while belaying. You can see in the pic above that the sun is slowly creeping over towards my belay. At times, the wind gusted so hard that it nearly lifted me off the ledge.

After a successful lead Brent hauled me up to the belay. On the last pitch you have several options. Unfortunately, the weather was doing it's thing again so I picked the easiest way and did not get any pics. Bummer. We got a little wet on the descent to the bags but the sun came out about halfway back to the car and it was back to t-shirts. Gotta love Colorado weather.

Excellent day and an excellent climb.

EPILOGUE
Later that night (after dark) I discovered that I had lost my camera on the hike out. So Molly and I busted out at first light to see if we could find it. We were surprisingly successful! Here is a (reenactment) of me finding the camera.
And a "I cannot believe we actually found the camera" shot