2010 July

Near Buford, WY

To close out the month we attempt a full helping of our favorite activities, setting out to traverse the whole area from north to south with climbing packs, climb with friends at the Nautilus, and return via a different route. It’s great, and exhausting! Kate and Mark introduce us to some new friends, I lead the great first pitch of Captain Nemo, a really good hand and finger crack, and we traipse by nearly all our favorite crags (and some mud bogs). Fun!

Routes: Easy Jam 5.4, Cornelius 5.5, Captain Nemo p1 5.8

• GPX Viewer Track Map and Graphs (grand-loop-20100731)

Near Buford, WY

Returning to Vedauwoo with a new refrigerator (thanks to Annemarie and Huntington for more help), we break in the afternoon for a quick scramble up these prominent peaks. The woods are pretty thick on the north slopes, but just open enough to be fun to navigate. Both summits have nice views, and the south one demands some route finding and a couple of fun climbing moves.

• GPX Viewer Track Map and Graphs (twin-peaks-20100728)

Working with Vernal Creative, I customize Geo Mashup to create a map of submitted immigrant stories from across the united states. Additional work went into the video post submission interface, built on top of the All in One Video Pack plugin.

Quite the crew shows up for our main weekend gathering: Kate, Mark, Sean, Matt, Doug, and Liz traipse to the Plumb Line crag with us for some grovelling. I like all the short cracks I’ve climbed here, and of course I take another swing on Plumb Line itself, doing much better this time. Ann shows true ambition, taking a stab at Big Pink, and nearly making it to our applause. The day has a nice pace to it, someone always grunting on a climb, and someone else hamming it up on the ground.

At camp the moon rises over our lively campfire. When we retire for a long slumber, little pitter patters soon wake us up. The mouse assault begins, one per hour for the next four hours. Maybe next time we won’t choose the most popular free campsite in Vedauwoo.

Routes: Barley 5.6, Kasha 5.7+ Mark, Plumb Line 5.9+ TR, Big Pink 5.11b Ann TR

No Vedauwoo season would feel right without a day spent on top of the clamshell, a giant boulder that rests against Fall Wall in the main area. Dad, Doug, and Liz join us for the fun scramble up through the tunnel underneath to the base of the wall. We’re quickly reminded we’ve been climbing cracks, not slab. There’s no holds! But we all relax and improve greatly with each climb, egging each other on.

Routes: Easy Lieback 5.5 TR, Easy Friction 5.4, Cold Finger 5.7, Drop Zone 5.10a, and a new 5.11ish bolted line left of Easy Lieback on toprope

Near Buford, WY

I’m nearly a casualty before this hike even begins when Dad drops the tailgate on the double barreled dog cannon and nearly scores a direct hit.

Having survived that, following Dad’s cross country route to the pleasant loop around the Green mountains is a breeze. We scramble up a somewhat exposed little tower with great views.

Little rain showers blow over, and we trudge through a number of bogs, some qualifying for “stink bog” status.

• GPX Viewer Track Map and Graphs (green-mountain-20100722)

Our days have been so varied and interesting lately that I don’t mind so much when a more mundane occurrence consumes my birthday – our refrigerator quits working. We drive to Laramie to diagnose it, Annemarie and Huntington rescue us with ice, coolers, and a place to park for the night. We learn that the fridge is done for, so we’ll be back in a week to replace it. And with that my 38th year comes to a close!

Near Buford, WY

One of the things I love about Vedauwoo is that it’s too complex for me to mentally map, and I’m always discovering new places and new aspects of places I’ve visited. I’ve been in the Reynolds Hill area many times, but never followed the creek downstream, where it enters a windy, rocky little canyon. A great blue heron watches us from high on a boulder, along with many turkey vultures. We see trails I’ve never taken, and do a little cross country to complete the loop.

More visitors come in the evening – Annemarie and Huntington with charming 2-year-old Sophie, and Niesey. All dear friends I haven’t seen in a while.

• GPX Viewer Track Map and Graphs (reynolds-hill-20100717)

Happily in the hills again, we’re visited by Pete, Jim, and Chris B, who I haven’t seen since high school. The moon comes up and says hello too.

We return to the site where our experiments with mobile living began in 2005, the Lakeside KOA in Fort Collins. Every time we return somewhere, even a place we’ve only been once or twice, T-Rex returns immediately to his old haunts. Here he scratches a tree that probably bears the marks of his claws from years ago, and heads for a nap in the rock pile that makes the northern campground boundary. He also obsessively licks at his bandaged a leg as he has been for the past week – a leg that must at last be feeling dead to him. A day passes like this while we do some life maintenance in Fort Collins. Thursday our favorite vet in the area, Debbie Sunken, makes a final house call for us. She examines him, guessing that his hugely swollen elbow is a fibrosarcoma (cancer). A younger cat could handle an amputation, but at 16 years old T-Rex has finally met his match. Debbie and her husband sit with us in the shade of a tree and encourage us to tell our best T-Rex stories and say a teary goodbye as T loses consciousness and peacefully leaves us. His absence will be felt for a long time.