Outer Space into Orbit

Last week we wanted to “take it easy”, which more often than not means that instead of a big trip we end up having some very long and hard days.  This was no exception.  No car, no problem.

The weekend rolled around and I had the chance to do some “work” on the river, Liz was happy to take it easy all day and motivate me to double down and do some climbing with her that evening.

A two pitch simul-climb up famous castle rock, rolling the fault and the two pitches of catapult into one, and the south face of jello tower, and the two pitches of midway into the other.

The next day we took a similar approach and rode a short two miles out of town to climb at the Puzzle Palace, a fun little crag with 5 sport routes, we flashed em all but I would definitely recommend the last one we did, Cryptogram, a solid 100 ft 10b.  Fun.

The last day of our weekend we planned to climb the well known Orbit on the Snow Creek wall, a route we’ve tried to do once before but bailed before starting after squeezing in a lap on Outer Space and hoping to make it back in time for a L.M.A. event.   This time we had no schedule and wanted to go for it again, both routes in a day.

The approach starts just outside our front door, a short  four mile ride from town followed by the hour-ish hike gets you to the bottom of this beautiful 800 foot wall.

Outer Space goes off well, having already climbed the route twice, we’ve got it pretty well dialed.  The day was hot and after we topped out we realized we definitely didn’t bring enough water, lucky for us the stream in the descent gully was still flowing.  We refilled our bottles, filled our stomachs, and regained motivation.

Things start to get blurry here, bike ride, climb, heat, the day seemed to have started long ago when we started up Orbit, somewhere between 6 and 7 in the afternoon.

Our beta seemed to have been a little misleading, maybe more for a 70m rope, however, we managed to only add one pitch and the climb went pretty smoothly, with only minimal whining from myself.

We topped out at 9 in the evening, enjoying some beautiful sunset colors while climbing through a sea of amazing knobs, 100’s of feet off the deck.

We managed to almost make it back to the snow creek trail without turning on our lamps, but were forced to use em for the rest of the descent and the ride home.  We pulled back into the driveway a little after 11pm, a solid 14 hours after leaving.  Oh yeah, and we did it all with our legs.  Good day.