Chiloe had emailed earlier in the year that he'd be in San Francisco in mid-December and wondered if I would have time off to go climbing. With all the usual caveats regarding California winter weather I said I would. I've been practicing for retirement and have cut back to 70% at work, that's 7 hrs a day for four days... and usual 3 day weekends. He thought Friday would be a good time...

Well the weekend of his arrival the weather report has one nice day, Thursday, so I rearranged my schedule and picked him up at the Dublin/Pleasanton BART station. We made our way down to Pinnacles via the East Side. We didn't have any real ambitions... and that was good since my Wednesday gym session was brutal, including the yoga.

On our hike in the brook was running. The young ranger who passed us going up the trail commented that he had never seen it run in his 3.5 year tenure. All the mosses were looking happy and very green, and the lichens were glowing their silver-gray-green color. Every water streak was seeping, if not running water and I wondered if there had been enough time to dry stuff out... it rained in Livermore long into the night.

We got to Discovery Wall and decided to check out the conditions. After a quick run up Swallow Crack it seemed that lots was climbable... things were working out here so Chiloe lead up Jorge's Crack


I remember this being rated 5.10a but apparently it got down rated to 5.9... Chiloe did a good, careful job on his lead and reminded me that the real crux was the traverse over to the belay... which I slipped on being careless with my hand holds... I found the same wet hold that Chiloe found, only I didn't stick the move.


But it was supposed to be a fun day out with no real pressure... I thought I might have a go at Stupendous Man 5.10a since I had been training for that sort of thing... but I found that I didn't have enough left to pull the roof, though I certainly tried it a zillion different ways... just not going to happen. Chiloe went up to give it a go with much the same result.


Our trad spirit had us just back off instead of aiding over the roof, hang dogging it already felt odd... we headed out to the reservoir, I seemed to have remembered some nice place to top rope over their. The sun was already getting lower, and actually it seemed like a little hike might be the final bit of a really mellow day.

The spill way for the reservoir was flowing, hadn't seen that in a very long time


and while I can't post a rad TR with us pushing the limits of any kind of climbing, it wasn't part of the agenda to begin with...

...but getting a bite to eat and a beer and catching up on the happenings in our lives was very much on the agenda. And we succeeded to accomplish that...


The small Mexican restaurant in Tres Pinos had their "closed" sign on when we drove by, so we went into Hollister to find the Grillin' and Chillin' but our phones kept steering us to the one on San Benito, which isn't there anymore... so we wandered around and found a Mexican Grill that had just opened a couple of blocks north and they had good beer and interesting food...