Today is my one year anniversary of not being in St. Louis! Yay me! I can’t believe it’s been a year, but it also seems an eternity since I was living in STL. Life is good living in Boulder. I really love it there.
We leave today so it’ll be a short climbing day. We headed over to Cannibal Crag. This is a huge boulder with several sport climbs on it. It’s located in Calico Basin so no driving the loop road was needed. This wall involved a grueling 3 minute hike in. The humanity.
To our surprise, no one was there. Well, no climbers. There was the requisite creepy guy taking photos of his naked girlfriend there. What’s up with this in Red Rocks? It’s not the first time I’ve seen it. Ugh.
We started on a 5.8 which was fun, though a bit boring (easy). Next up was a climb to the right of it. We weren’t sure what it was, but it didn’t look much harder. Turns out it was a more interesting climb for sure. I enjoyed it (later we found this in the book – it was a 10a). 
Third, we did a 5.9+ climb. The plus was very stout – I never could pull one move on this climb (even when trying on top rope). We wondered if something had broken off. A 5.9+ shouldn’t be like this. 
Next we moved to a very difficult 5.11a. The crux sequence was brutal! But fun. Then we did the 5.11a and the 5.11d arête routes. These were also fun and burly. 
Finally, Dave did an 11a on the opposite wall. I was already cooked and he realized on the wall that he was too. I loved the climbing here – overhanging, edgy and powerful. Hopefully on the next trip we can do move like this.
A fun thing happened while here today – we ran into Diane and Jeff – the couple we met in Cochise months before. We’d emailed before we went on this trip hoping to meet up with them, but we never heard from them. Pretty cool seeing them! Too bad we were leaving that afternoon.
We headed back to the camper and got everything ready to go. We were on the road by 4pm and bivied in Utah as usual. We found a comfy truck rest area and parked and went to bed. We were home by 6pm the next day (May 2nd). May 2nd incidentally is the day I landed in Boulder one year before. I wonder if May 2nd will always have me coming home.It’s such fun to go on these trips, but it’s always fun to come home. I missed the birds and they missed us! Of course, now we just dream of our next fifth wheel adventure – that should happen in August after the semester ends.
As for the next trip - Dave will head to the desert with they guys in about three days.
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