One Summer, One Subaru, Eight Thousand Miles, Five Ropes, 11 Pair of Shoes, One Golf Club, One Destiny, and a Continuing List of Blog Title Cliches..

Blogjack! Nice little gig you have, but the mercenaries from 20 school have infiltrated your deepest security measures (thanks Jake) to infect you with stories of our recent alpine bouldering and particularly difficult scrambling adventures in Wyoming and California. And in case you didn't hear or assume, we did NOT take the motorcycle out - it was either $1200 of funding or a summer-long type 2 adventure (hah).

Wanting to deviate a LITTLE from the reg DMC locales of the Tetons, Winds, and Sierras, we first checked out Mt. Rushmore and decided that Jefferson’s Mandible would indeed NOT go free. It looks like you can get some master cams in his pores but really we need a full rack of anticams (http://climbingnarc.com/2010/05/the-anti-cam/) to aid the incisor pitch. Funny that climbing at the South Dakota Needles wasn’t actually much different from this. Cool granite towers and hard sport, but lots of guidebook confusion and a noticeable lack of protection.

Devil’s Tower is CRAZY, you’ve never seen anything like this. The feature itself is surreal and so is the climbing experience. Out-of-breath tourists on a paved-flat walkway gawk as you lock and stem through the highest concentration of the most beautiful, sustained, clean, and well protected cracks and corners/dihedrals you’ve ever seen. 5.10 might be the best grade to climb at the tower but there’s really great stuff on either side of it, although I swear neither of us could figure out how to climb 5.9 or lower unawkwardly after finally getting comfortable on long hard cracks. Make a trip out of going to the Tower or at least stop by sometime. Be sure to bring a double rack of nuts and a golf club for the nine holes of golf at the top of the Tower (stupid tourists who don’t read signs will believe anything)!

Quick anecdote. We've been playing the license plate game (only Hawaii to go) and holy shit Vermont gets out and does cool stuff more than Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi combined. Not even per capita. Per fucking fact-ita.

Everyone knows about the Tetons by now, but everyone prolly don’t know that there can still be a LOT of snow there around August. We couldn’t do the Grand (or even Cathedral) Traverse and had to rent cast iron ice axes just to get up to the shoulder below Exum Ridge. Its a long hike up to the shoulder, a bit of a climb up Lower Exum Ridge, and then another simul/hike up proper Exum Ridge to the top of the biggest breast (..teton). This was another of our encounters of a Jack Durrance route of some sort - he has the FD down Exum Ridge as well as the FA on the most popular route up the Tower. The man did a lot of shit and is even mentioned in the Winds guidebooks and Freddie Wilkinson account of the 2008 K2 disaster, One Mountain Thousand Summits. I’m about half way through that right now and its really a spectacular read. He craftily weaves 8000m mountaineering history in with his research and analysis of the disaster, really covering the subject while not boring you. It probably makes a good case to never get into that shit and it feels good to have all of our light and fast alpinism horns blown a little.

“John Joline was right, he hit the nail on the head with that place,” said Jake, about the Winds, when we visited him in Madison (who seemed to be so happy there he was touting his own beer drinking capabilities over Wisconsin rock). We were supposed to meet John in his fabled East Fork Valley, but unrelated tooth and climbing partner problems delayed him a few weeks so we busted into the Cirque of the Towers and Deep Lake area for 10 days ourselves. In the Cirque you camp in a field of wildflowers with a waterfall in the middle, weather is irregular but short-lived when it comes in, and the granite is good to chossy. We did some really great classics and then tried the 20 mile, 5.8 Cirque Traverse in a day and punted HARD. After some ridicucool climbing and the most exposed fucking 5.8 move I’ve ever heard of in my life, we bailed at dark down what we thought would be a pretty standard bail highway, considering the couple hundred dollars of bail spectra, biners, and nuts we’d pulled off of other climbs. After leaving some gear and a 5.grassy traverse at 11,000 ft we rapped into a steep snow gully and spent the next few hours picking our way down slippery rocks where we could find them. We left like three anchors and STILL are coming out of that place with a net gain of bail gear, what a goat rodeo HAH.

Now we’ve spent the last couple days in Oakland eating everything in sight and gearing up for Temple Crag, the Incredible Hulk, and Yosemite big rock. Climb safe and send/text us a shout out if you’re going to be in California or want us to stop by on our way back east in September!

If you think you’re gonna plummet, youuu must gun it!
- A guy we met named Joe

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M,D&L