Sunday, August 16, 2009

08-07-09: Moving Camp and Pine Creek Canyon

We got up early and moved the trailer to the new bivy site – a secluded spot between Mammoth and Bishop. The place offered a beautiful view of Mammoth Mountain and the amazing Minarets, silence, no other campers and visiting adult bald eagles each evening. Though this site meant a bit of driving most days, we decided it was worth it. We were not disappointed in this decision. Trying to get Dave to leave this site to go home at the end of our trip was a challenge.

After getting set up, we drove to Pine Creek Canyon to climb. We hiked up to what looked like a very promising wall and climbed a 5.9 slab in the warm sun. The warmth was wonderful! It was odd to think that in Tuolumne Meadows it was really cold and likely snowing.

Though the warmth was great, it was clear that unless we wanted to do lots of slab climbing (yuck!), we needed to hike to the Mustache Wall. So we did. The Mustache Wall is named because when the area was being developed, climbers just passed it by for some time. Suddenly they realized there was great climbing right there on the wall they’d passed over and over again – a wall that was right under their nose! Great name!

At the Mustache Wall, we climbed an 11b, 10a, 11c 10d. Route names have evaporated from our memories. It was a nice area and we had a good time.

Dave started mentioning that his elbow felt funny. He thought maybe a tiny wound he’d gotten days before may have been getting infected. It was late, so we headed back.

This was going to be an extra fun evening because Kenny was arriving. He, his wife Debbie and their kids had visited us in Colorado when we got married. It was going to be fun to spend a bit more time with Kenny at least. Turns out he was only minutes behind us when we hit 395. We waited for Kenny at the bivy turnout and headed in to the trailer, a lobster dinner, wine and great fun!

I checked out Dave’s elbow and the tiny wound did not look infected at all. But oddly, in an arrive about the size of a lime (why do we always use fruit analogies?), there was considerable redness, heat and swelling. Weird. Kenny told us about one time when he thumped his elbow and he got bursitis from it. We thought that odd since we believed bursitis to be an ‘old persons’ issue. We were going to get schooled on this notion shortly.














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