July 4 weekend

Holiday weekends can be a lot of pressure. With two extra days off, I usually want to make sure I make the most of them which means planning way ahead and lots of very adult "preparation". Having already planned our next xmas in advance, we gave ourselves a break and played it by ear this weekend. On Friday we had a crazy kiteboarding session at Alameda; there was actually too much wind for my 12 meter kite, and I was having to really work hard to avoid moving uncomfortably fast. Even so, it was exciting as usual, and I even got a chance to try out Chloes GK Sonic 8, which I could make work with a little fancy (well, as fancy as I am able to perform) kitework.

We slept in on Saturday, which turned out to be a mistake because there were huge traffic jams half of the way up to Alta. I think it took us almost four hours to get there. Since we still have the wonderful summer daylight until eight PM or so, I took the opportunity to try to clear out some of the overgrown forest. It was hard work, and I ended up with something like thirteen huge red throbbing mosquito bites just on my back.

The next day we headed out to Big Chief, where it looked like a tour bus of climbers had arrived. Thankfully American climbers are much weaker than their French counterparts, and we are honorary French Climbers. What this means is that we can move on to the mostly unoccupied medium difficulty climbs while people queue up for the easy ones. After a criminally underbolted warmup 5.9, we moved on to Eat the Worm, which I did on sight, and then on to Pow Wow, an excellent overhanging 11a. Finally we played around on Totally Chawsome, which I did second try. A Japanese dude there from Nagano and his friend from Tahoe were checking out the moves on "All guns blazing", and let me try out the opening moves.

After driving back to Alta, I shifted into high gear and chopped down many more trees (including a wild cherry, accidentally! aaaaagh!).

before, during, after:


me in action


and one of the three piles of cuttings