Saturday @ Rumbling Bald

1.30.09. Finally, it's starting to feel like last season at the Bald! Temps were probably in the 60s and the sun was out all day. Definite t-shirt weather for part of the day. It's been such an intermittenly wet and cold season, it was nice to get a warm day in the sun.

I rode down to the Bald with Robert, whose transmission is in a bad way and about to blow up on him. My clutch is also about to blow, and somehow we decided it was better to take the bad transmission over the bad clutch. Anyway, send Robert some good car vibes.

After warming up on the Gateway and "Retarded Girlfriend" (aka "Family") boulders, we rolled over to around Shady Grove and found Chris. I got close to doing Propeller Head (V4 going on V6), but just didn't want to dig in that deep for the lock off on my right shoulder. We all also tried Mamma-Lick-Your-BooBoo-Day (WTF?!), a V8 slab monster. Check out the pics--we had a hard time getting much past 2 moves up it. It's balancy and strange.

Next we headed up the hill. I did Lost Cause (V5) first go--the shoulder must be getting better! There was a whole mess of people up there, and we all worked various problems in that area for awhile, including a really, really good V5 that has no name in the guidebook. It's the only problem on this boulder, and it's a good mix of crimps, slopers, and heel hooks. I highly recommend it. It's maybe 20 yards right of Lost Cause, just over the slabs. Meanwhile, Robert kept working "Born Slippy", a relatively new V9 below the V5 just mentioned; it looks like a great climb. I put up a new V2 traverse on the lip of the Born Slippy boulder and called it "Birth Defect". It's actually pretty fun. Maybe it's been done before--who knows.

We cooled down on "The Nut" or something like that--it's a funky V1 wrestle uphill of Shady Grove.

AS for pictures, it was a hard to get too much today. Since we showed up at noon, it was super high contrast b/c of the bright, sunny weather. But I got a few decent shots, especially at the end of the day.

All in all, another great day made somewhat bittersweet by the imminent closure.

A note on pictures: Some people have expressed an interest in wanting to download the images in the slideshow. To do this:
1: Click on the Flickr link in the top left corner of the slideshow. This will take you to the Frixtion flickr page.
2: Click on the picture you want; this will load the big version.
3: Right click and download the image. They are all low-res so they won't print worth a damn. Let me know if you want a hi-res version.

If this doesn't work for some reason--just leave me a comment!