Climbing Vedauwoo and Greyrock

Vedauwoo Wyoming is about an hour north or Fort Collins Colorado.  I had the opportunity to go up there climbing with my good friends Brody and Kiley. Spending the month here in Denver has been great because it has all of this new stuff to check out and play on. When I pulled out of Oakland a few weeks ago to head over Kimber and I were in a hurry and I ended up leaving my entire climbing bag in our living room!!! Luckily I had thrown Kimbers harness and my climbing helmet in a different bag but I ended up having to spend the weekend climbing in some of Brody's old shoes that had a hole in the toe and in Kimbers women's size small harness. I made it work.

We started the day off with a 5.7 mountainproject "classic" off-width rout called "Mother 1". It was a deep groove single pitch rout. None of us had brought tape for our hands and we regretted it big time while climbing. I decided to take the lead. Off-width is defined in wiki as "a crack that is two wide for effective hand or foot jams, but is not as large as a chimney." Translation, rating mean little because they are freaking hard and you have to jam all different parts of your body into the crack to get up the thing. I will let the pictures tell the story of how it went. By the end I had ripped up hands, shoulders and ankles. Not sure how "classic" it was but I still had fun.

Kiley making her way up.

The second climb of the day was  up another single pitch 5.7 low angle off-width climb called Edward's Crack. It had a fun start, went into a low angle shallow groove and then finished with pulling a roof which was pretty fun. Brody took the lead of this one, Kiley followed and I brought up the rear.

Edwards Crack is the vertical arm of the obvious cross on the left face. 

Greyrock is up Poudre Canyon about 30min outside of Fort Collins Colorado. Getting to it required an hour approach hike. Brody and I took it at a good clip and were a bit surprised to see that it even hiking that fast we didn't beat the mountainproject time. This rout had 4 pitches and went at 5.8. Brody took the first pitch which had the crux move requiring him to pull a roof off the ground. He then worked his way up through a maze of cracks to the belay. My lead was basically a walk up with another fun roof move that had a huge hero hold making it more fun that scary. The last two pitches were on the verg of us just freeing them because they were so easy. It was great to get out anyways. There is something about being in the mountains with friends that makes me feel good about life....real good.

Me on pitch 2.