Bishop

Well, in a random change of events, yesterday we decided to bail on St. George and make the 6 hour drive to Bishop, CA instead. There were numerous reasons for leaving St. George, but in a nutshell it was too cold, we weren't syked on the hike, and the routes didn't inspire us enough. After all the routes / training I did in the past few months, I am a little burned out from sport climbing and am having a lot more fun on difficult boulder problems lately then on hard sport routes. This is how things typically work for me; motivation comes in waves and sometimes I am very syked for sport routes, and at other times I am really syked on bouldering. I think this is a great strategy and allows me to improve at all aspects of climbing, instead of narrowing in on just one approach. I am really syked to start bouldering a lot more in the next few months and see how far I can push my limits; My goal is to climb numerous V13 boulders and try to complete a V14 by next summer.

But anyways, now we are here in Bishop and I have 5 more days to try to complete projects. Today I got on "Direction", V13, and after working out some good beta, I was able to climb into the stand start without too much difficulty. The first few moves involve big reaches on bad crimps and sidepulls, maybe V11 boulder in itself, then after that comes the meat of the problem.. grab a very small, sharp right hand crimp, set your feet up and do a difficult throw move to a flat left hand crimp. The stand start of Direction (called "Thunderbird", V11/12) is basically pulling onto the wall and doing this move, followed by two much easier tension moves. I climbed the stand start on my last trip to Bishop, but doing the move from the sit-start is a much greater challenge. Since my skin was pretty bad today I didn't want to pull off the sharp right hand hold, but the fact that I was able to link the bottom gives me lots of motivation to try to complete the whole problem in the next few days ! It seems like I am recovering fast from my sickness and hope that my power will return to its fullest by the end of this mini trip !