Pine Mountain Highlights

A few back-dates are in order before bringing my blog up-to-date. I promised myself I'd highlight the rest of my climbing trip and write a piece about the feelings I had from being home before doing anything else. So here I go, writing and publishing mobile - hope it works.

To start, we had the Suzi Lee special breakfast before our long drive to Pine Mountains that kept us fueled as we chatted our way north.  Look at this set-up - there's nothing like hanging out with Suzi, especially on her turf.  This was first breakfast and enough to sustain me through the freeway and the long, windy road up to Pine Mountain.

By this day Suzi admitted to Katie that this is what we do in California: Put people in a car and drive to destinations. Katie looked fairly comfortable in the backseat taking in the "view" from the freeway and managing the curvy ascent up to what became a beautiful oasis - what a perfect place to climb!

After a three hour trip, we arrived here at Picnic Table boulders, a fantastic area for warming up.

We warmed up on some fresh sandstone lines and then moved on to the Juan Carlos Dyno, which was more like the Juan Carlos Deadpoint for Katie.  I am going to try to post a video of Katie doing this.  This picture of me documents the multiple times I came just shy of a fingertip away.

Meanwhile, Suzi had second breakfast and showed her bravery as she went high up on the scary Happy Hunting Grounds boulder - a beautiful line to a scary slopey top-out.

Among so much awesomeness, the one I will remember most was Katie's beautiful flash of the problem, "Surrounding Fish." I was drawn to it after seeing a picture of Todd Mei on this problem in the guidebook. Katie threw up her right heel and before we could move all the pads, she worked through the crux and sent it. Actually, its more accurate to say she bolted through the crux and sent it without even breathing. SHE should have been wearing the "Send" shirt!

A glorious day of climbing ended with a little send train on a fun V3, a pine come fight, some posed shots for our Asian girlfriend, and a mediocre Mexican dinner (thanks Yelp).  The day wouldn't have been complete though without traffic, which we ran into, but we didn't complain - after a full day of climbing, life is good.