To put it bluntly, climbing trips can be boring. Days are filled with climbing, talking about climbing, eating while worrying about what you're eating and how it will affect your climbing, resting to maximize climbing, etc. Add in the excitement of rural central Utah and you got a recipe for some serious, one-dimensional boredom. I'm not trying to make it sound like I'm not having a good time. On the contrary, I'm here by choice and am having a good time. I just don't want the average person to confuse a climbing trip with fun. ;) To illustrate, I'll detail a few days here in Maple.
Day 1: Wake up in the morning. Roll over in the sleeping bag and fight for more sleep. Swear to yourself about the cars driving by and the damn weekend warriors with jobs and responsibilities. It's 10AM, what are you doing here so early?! Eventually get out of bed (almost always driven by the need to pee).
Sit around, slowly get hydrated and contemplate breakfast. Survey the damage the critters (chipmunks, marmots, raccoons, field mice, etc) did during the night.
Try to convince yourself to make pancakes for breakfast. Eventually give up and eat cereal with bananas. Make sure you don't smell the milk in the cooler, some things are best not known.
Make coffee or drink diet coke (aka the dehydration phase). Read. Eventually make lunch and pack your stuff.
Realize that it's now noon. Chastise yourself for wasting the day and start the trudge up to the Pipe Dream Cave, about 20 minutes steeply uphill.
Get to the cave and realize that you're one of the first people there. The Pipe Dream crowd seems to hate mornings. Warm up on routes that you've done many times. Comment that the warmups are all overgraded, even though you have them ruthlessly wired.
Climb until 8 or so, falling off your project repeatedly. Occasionally someone will actually redpoint something. This is a Major Event and will be repeatedly discussed during the talking about climbing that was mentioned earlier.
Hike back down to camp. Realize that the altitude and dry air have dehydrated you. Chug some water to rehydrate. Decide on what you're making for dinner and get started. Grab a beer out of the creek (dehydrate) while cooking. Read or watch a movie while eating dinner. Clean up so the damn varmits won't destroy everything during the night.
If you're feeling really energetic, open a second beer while watching the movie. I make it to this stage about 1 out of 5 nights. Most nights I decide I'm too tired and head to bed. Try to read while mentally taunting yourself for going to bed before it's fully dark. Getting old isn't pretty.
Fall asleep usually with clothes still on.
Theoretically there is a third beer stage where you consume 3 whole beers, perhaps staying up 'til the wild and crazy hour of midnight. I say "theoretically" because this stage has never been seen outside of the controlled environment of the lab.
Day 2: Just like Groundhog Day, this is a Repeat of Day 1, again going to the Pipe Dream. Even though there are lots of places to climb at Maple, getting stuck in the Pipe Dream rut is very easy to do (AKA the stashed rope syndrome).
Day 3: Rest Day
Repeat the morning of Days 1 and 2 although this time you win the mental argument and make pancakes. Clean up your dishes, swearing to never make pancakes again.
Take stock of camp supplies. Water, propane, beer, the essentials. Make a shopping list and head into Ephraim, 25 minutes away. Ephraim is the home of Snow College, a two-year college founded by Mormons (gasp!) but now a part of the State of Utah's University system. For three dollars you can use the college's rec center. You can work out, swim, or, most importantly, take showers.
Take a long shower, trying to remove all the grime that's built up from living in the dirt. By Murphy's Law you're guaranteed to find someplace dirty on you later in the day but being mostly clean is a lot better than the alternative.
Head to the library. The Snow College library is brand new and very plush. It also provides free wireless and is a great place to work or kill time.
Go grab lunch. Your options are pizza, pizza (different places, nearly identical food), bad mexican, McDonalds, or the Satisfied Ewe Cafe (no, I'm not making up the name). There was a Subway but they bulldozed it three days ago (once again I'm not making that up).
After lunch, head to Walmart. This is usually the highlight of a rest day. You can get almost everything you need here in one stop while killing up to 2 hours in the process (today I wandered the automotive section for no reason whatsoever). Note above where I say you can get almost everything you need here. Utah has some pretty odd alcohol laws, even for someone who lives in Georgia. To buy good beer (by good beer I mean non-3.2 beer), you must get it from the state liquor store. It also must be sold warm. I think the logic for this is something like the waiting period for purchasing firearms. Ephraim has a state store, a squat cinderblock building right on the main road. Going in to this place is like visiting a seedy porn store, people wear hats and dark glasses and no one inside makes eye contact with each other. The selection is terrible and the prices high. Fortunately, at one beer a night, the frequency with which one needs to replenish the beer supplies is low.
Once the Walmarting is done and the beer is procured (before 7P, Utah wouldn't want people buying booze during non-working hours!), head back to camp. Read and kill more time until dinner. Make dinner and head to bed, preparing to start the whole process over tomorrow.
Good times!
For those that prefer pictures to words, here are some photos that I took of Mark, an Atlanta climber, at the Pipe Dream Cave. The route he's on is called the Great Feast and is rated 13c.
 |
| I never knew those things were on! |
