Note: Unfortunately the images that should be linked from this are lost to the sands of multiple server migrations.

In honor of the May Day honoring of the struggle for the eight hour workday, MattLiggett and I took off for three days of blissful climbing at TheRed. I from work and Matt in his gap between school semesters.

Weather at the red river gorge is a tricky business. The forecast is not to be trusted. Other than an unfortunate late night knock on my tent with "my tent is all wet, give me the car keys" we had fine weather, fine climbing and, unusually, some fine food.

We had some goals:

• Get Matt doing some easy leads so he could hone his clipping and comfort.
• Get me placing my huge pile of camalots, much too shiny and new, into some cracks.
• Have fun.
• Celebrate the impending collapse of the multi-national corporatist hegemony through the pursuit of leisure and the wearing of products from Patagonia and Chaco.
• I think we hit these pretty good but it cannot be said that we pulled down hard, bro. These were not those days. Some other days will be those days, and that will be good too.

Thumbnails of the entire collection of photos can be found in TheWiki at TheRedMay2004Thumb. For each picture, clicking on the + or ++ will take you to medium and huge versions of the pictures. For many, if you are just looking at the thumbs you are missing out.

Day One

We arrived late Sunday night, quickly set up tents, and waited for the morning. It arrived with a bit of a chill and a lack of coffee. Our destination: RoadsideCrag.

RoadsideCrag is probably the most popular crag at TheRed. It has a little bit of everything--sport and trad, easy and hard--and a nice simple approach. Because of this it is often full of people on the weekends.

It was Monday. Weeks of intense planning and complicated math had led us to believe that a weekday would turn the place into our own personal palace of climbing pleasure. Hee! No. It wasn't full, but we did some waiting and while we did who comes trucking up the trail but some chums from home on a bachelor party climbing expedition.

One end of RoadsideCrag, the right or East end, is filled up with supposedly safe and easy sport leads. Just what we wanted for goal #1. The easiest one, CSharpOrBFlat, was occupado, as was AlteredScale, so we went for AllCowsEatGrass.

Like most of the other routes in the area, it's a medium length, mostly vertical but kind of slabby, jesus I would hate to fall on this kind of experience.

Up I went. When I came down, Matt went up. This is different from what we would do later in the day and the days following.

Matt chose to top rope the route as he was a bit out of practice from all the educating he's been getting to prepare for the impending revolution. He goes to the top where he finds the anchor bolts from which I've just lowered are moving in the rock.

For those of you unfamiliar with these sorts of things, this is double plus ungood. From my position down on the ground I can tell Matt's a little wigged out: he's telling me to move him very gently, he accidently drops a quickdraw (which happily slides down the rope and gently lands on the ground, rather than on my head where I've not yet put my brand new helmet), and he takes extra special long to clean up and descend. But he calmly refrains from telling me what's up until he's safely on the ground (otherwise we would have a clusterfuck of deciding what the right thing to do is).

Oddly, when we tell our neighboring climbers of the sad state of the anchors on this climb not only do they say something that amounts to "oh yeah, most of them are messed up in some way" but then they go and climb on them.

We climb CSharpOrBFlat and YouCanTuneAPianoButYouCantTunaFish and decide if we are going to be dealing with unreliable anchors, they may as well be ones we place ourselves.

So we moved west to RoadsideAttraction.

One hundred and forty feet of fun. RoadsideAttraction is very well known: it's pretty easy, easy to get to and very satisfying. I'm told that climbing it naked in the dark is something of a must do once you have the skillz.

I found it a bit unnerving myself, first time and all, so I kept my clothes. Unlike the other routes we had done that day, when I got to the top, I sat down, set up an anchor and belayed Matt up to me. From our perch we looked out upon a lovely view and felt mighty good.

Here I am, the conquering hero, after our descent:

And then we were hungry. And cold. And tired. And lazy. So we went to the restaurant at the Natural Bridge Park lodge. It was yummy. We ate. We reminisced about those fun times back in the day when we climbed RoadsideAttraction. We decided we wanted more, tomorrow would be FortressWall. And to our tents we went, satisfied.

Day Two

Another fella from Bloomington, Andy, was at Miguels as part of a three week climbing extravaganza before returning to the world of employment and obligations. He (and his dog, ChiliDog) joined us for our adventures at FortressWall.

Fortress has traditional climbs only. A whole mess of them, from super easy to somewhere on the hard side of moderate. All kinds of fine places to place gear of all sorts of sizes.

The sun was shining into our lovely setting. It was dry and warm and we had the whole place to ourselves. Here's Matt, on CalypsoIi, saluting our good fortune (and the workers of the world):

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Next was Snake and WhereLizardsDare. Fortress has two levels. There are the climbs that start from the ground, like Snake, and those that start at the end of the first set, like WhereLizardsDare. If you make this picture

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extra big (hit the ++), near the middle of the frame you'll find my orange helmet. That's me belaying people up SnaKe (which is out of the frame to the left). Above me, at about 1 o'clock is WhereLizardsDare (where we saw no lizards, but we did see them on CalypsoIi).

WhereLizardsDare is a fabulous climb: difficult off balance stemming with a teeny finger crack to help you out, all way up high in the sky.

We were on a schedule, we had dinner plans, but there was no way we were going to miss BedtimeForBonzo. Last fall I had made it halfway up the second pitch of the climb before freaking out and downclimbing because I had no idea where I was supposed to go. Oh, and it was too dark to see.

The view from the top is quite compelling:

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Having never been there before I wasn't sure it was going to be like that, but I had a hunch. And I was right. The pleasure of topping out on this climb and simply being there,

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on top of everything,

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was sublime. Here's a demonstration from Matt:

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Andy clued us in to a good thing to know:

You can walk off the second pitch of BedtimeForBonzo and return to the anchors of the first pitch, avoiding what might be a tricky rappel off the top. I wonder if a long rope would get us down from the top in a single go?

Our original schedule had us back to Miguels at 6:00 to head into Lexington to meet Jeremy and Gail. It was about 5:50 when we hit the dirt below the climb, so we skipped Miguels, and scooted to Lexington where we changed shirts in the parking lot of the restaurant. There we ate an enormous pile of yummy fishy sushi things and had a rollicking good time. Jeremy and Gail are good like that.

On the drive into Lexington, with the setting sun, came rain. It stayed around, off and on, for most of the night.

Day Three

I'm getting a bit tired by day three. Matt, who's been sleeping in the car because of the aforementioned rain in his tent, gives up on his first attempt to wake me up. He comes back later. I'm not up for anything too difficult and vote for the easy approach of PhanTasia.

Leading easy to moderate trad climbs is not all that physically exhausting. Yes, you have to work hard, but the sheer number of calories on a day of easy trad doesn't compete with a day of harder sport. Much of it is the amount of time involved. Some of it is the much lower level of difficulty. Yet, at the end of a day of leading trad routes, I'm still at least as exhausted as a sport day. Exhausted by the degree of responsibility I'm putting on my own choices.

So we went to PhanTasia, where we did the lovely AttackOfTheSandShark

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and the imposing StAlfonsos

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I led the first and Andy got the second. After that we ran up LordOfTheFlies and CreatureFeature, enjoyed some fine Miguels pizza and headed home into the setting sun.

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The following two days I worked enough to not need to take any vacation. So much for the eight hour work day. Workers unite, anyway.

Next week I go to New York for a conference, after that my uncle is over from Britain, sometime soon thereafter I hope to have some time with my bun in Seattle. Somewhere in there I'll get more climbing.