Friday I woke up with yet another hang over. In our inebriated state the night before we had decided that, if the weather was still bad we would fore go climbing and watch the Sopranos all day. I was pretty worked from so much outdoor activity, and I told Joe the thought of climbing made me want to cry. He said "If you leave Montana crying I'll be very happy".
But, at 8 am Friday the sun was shining. Pika, one of Joe's cats, was chewing on my head. And Joe was wandering around the kitchen with his climbing clothes on. I contemplated faking death until it was too late for us to climb but then decided that I really wanted to go climbing instead.
I put on my clothes, the same ones I had been wearing all week. They smelled bad. Eye wateringly bad. When I'm on vacation I'm not about taking showers and being clean so I only brought one set of clothes to climb in. Joe's clothes smelled bad too. As we were hiking in to Mummy 1, back in Hyalite, I kept getting a whiff of my shirt through my down parka. I wanted to puke every time I smelled it. Also my boots were soaked, as were my mittens. And it was cold outside, probably around 5 degrees F.
That was my favorite approach, even though it was long and steep. You go around this bend, thinking the uphill will never ever stop, and suddenly there's the climb, all blue and shiny in the sun. It's like walking into your house after a long flight and finding someone has set up all your favorite sushi rolls on the kitchen table and you can't wait to sit down and eat them.
I should mention that we stopped half way up the approach because, shock and surprise, these two girls started yelling "Joe! Joe!" as we were walking by, and he stopped to talk to them. They were some girls he knows from town.
While we were getting our harnesses and crampons on Joe offered me a piece of a skor bar, which I've never had before. I ate it and Joe was immediately like "you don't really like it, do you?" I guess after a week of hanging out with me I'm pretty easy to read.
Mummy 1 wasn't a super hard climb, but I was tired and there were steep sections where my crampons were just shit. Also, it was covered with snow so it was hard to see where I was putting my feet. The first section was about 15 feet of vertical and I had to pull a screw out. I tried to get my feet in a good place but my left crampon kept blowing. I was cold and getting colder by the second. I couldn't get the fucking screw out easily because it had iced over on the top. My arms felt like ragged bath mats that someone should have throw away long ago.
After clearing that section I got into some super shit ice. Joe had warned me it was plating and to check my tools before I weighted them. I was trying to pull out the third screw on the route, and had my left ax in a pocket that was covered in snow so I couldn't really see the placement. My left crampon came out of the ice and I grabbed my left tool. Something tweaked in my shoulder and then the fucking ice plated out. I almost dropped my ice ax. My hands were so cold I could hardly close them but I managed to catch my tool.
When I got to the top of the climb Joe told me to look up. A big hawk of some kind was flying right over my head. It was beautiful. It reminded me of the time I saw a hawk climbing Power Play with Mayo. The wing span of the bird was huge.
I stumbled over to the anchor and looked out over the valley. Joe was pointing out ice climbs on the other side of the canyon and we could see two guys climbing over there. Then I looked behind me and saw Mummy 2 and the mountains. It's hard to exactly explain what that felt like but it's kind of like being at the airport waiting for a friend and suddenly you see them walking towards you and you're incredibly happy. So even though I climbed like shit I was very grateful to be standing on top of Mummy 1, seeing all the stuff that you can see from up there, and it was still more fun than anything else you can do.
After we rapped down we walked around so Joe could take pictures of some of the other climbs. We went into this super cool ice cave. Joe was thinking to climb the curtain that made up one wall of the ice cave but I was like I think my arms are going to fall off. He took a picture of one unnamed climb and then we talked about calling it "my legs are my albatross", a quote from an email
I got from Gadd. He's going to put it in the next guide book.
On the way down we, shock and surprise, ran into a group of four guys who knew Joe. He gave them recommendations on where to take some mormon girls climbing. I've never fucked a mormon but I might so I could steal his underwear. They have secret underwear that no one is supposed to see. Then we talked about women who have bushy bushes that hang out the sides of their underwear. Joe said that is the ultimate boner shrinker.
When we got back to Joe's he gave me a grivel t-shirt. I suspect it's because the t-shirt I had been wearing while we weren't climbing was starting to smell. He also gave me these cool little rubber things that you use with a carabiner to provide an easy way to hook screws when you're cleaning a route.
That night we went to a restaurant where Joe is learning to cook. I had a bit of a crisis trying to find something to wear as I had driven out to Montana in a pajama top and didn't bring any non climbing clothes except for one shirt that got wet and gross at Chico hot springs. I ended up wearing my pajama top.
We sat at the bar. We ran into, shock and surprise, a bunch of people who know Joe. We picked a wine called guilty off the list and it was excellent and appropriate.
We were being kind of tired and low key until the restaurant owner's girlfriend Jen showed up. Joe said he thought we were similar characters. I agreed when, five minutes into the conversation, she executed the perfect insertion of the word "cunt" in an otherwise innocuous sentence.
I mentioned that I thought people should use the words cunt, twat, and pussy more often, as people usually just say dick, and look where that's gotten the world. Then she brought up the Imoto water study and how she thought it was shit that words can change things. Then I tried to remember the name of the movie about the Imoto water study and the bartender Nathaniel said "it's what the bleep do we know?". He really likes physics. I should mention here that Joe thought about getting a degree in physics but he found the course work boring. But he talks like an engineer which is funny. He was going on with this technical explanation about this ice curtain we were looking at climbing and finally I was like "so Joe, what you are saying is the ice is cracked?" What a geek.
I attempted to have a side conversation with Nathaniel about quantum physics and karate (he does muay thai which is similar to the karate form I studied, hisardut) while also talking to Jen about her chickens.
Until I had an organic egg, resulting in a discussion about eggs with Joe, I didn't realize a chicken doesn't have to get fucked to lay an egg. And then I found out from Jen you can buy eggs of any kind of chicken you want and put them in this machine that makes them hatch. I suggested that she write words on the eggs to test Imoto's theory. At first I was thinking "happy" and "sad" but then thought it wouldn't be good to have sad chickens. So I suggested she draw a penis on a few eggs and see if they came out roosters. She said that was manipulation and she didn't want to do that. And the eggs she has are expensive because they are an almost extinct breed, so we were thinking she should do the experiment with cheap eggs.
Then I went out and smoked and while doing that started thinking about the crystalline structures of ice and chaos theory and when I got back inside tried to explain a poorly expressed idea about studying chaos with ice so you could get a PhD but the whole time you would be ice climbing. Jen said my idea sucked. Then I started talking to Nathaniel about chaos and a tangent about how differential equations are fun but by that point we had finished the bottle of guilty and I don't remember what the fuck I was saying. I do remember Joe telling me that I should stop ordering my eggs by saying "I want them to be flat and cooked at the yellow part and not mixed in all together" and instead say "I want my eggs over hard" and me saying something inappropriate about over hard right as the chef that's teaching Joe how to cook walked out of the kitchen. He laughed and walked back in and Joe said "that was perfect timing".
Joe drove us home since I was kind of liquidated, but first we stopped by a gas station to get ingredients so Joe could make us Harriet's hot cakes, which is a special recipe his grandmother made up. We had to buy two eggs and some milk. Joe put the eggs in his down jacket pocket, which I wasn't sure was a great idea, especially when he was putting his seat belt on, but the eggs didn't break. I vaguely remember saying something about burned pancakes and how I would be really depressed if the pancakes were burned. I think we watched some sopranos when we got home, and we finished the bottle of red wine with the lady in the red dress on the label.
And Joe, ha ha, told me that night he was worried I was going to get bored hanging out with him.
Joe made hotcakes Saturday morning and they were perfect.
But, at 8 am Friday the sun was shining. Pika, one of Joe's cats, was chewing on my head. And Joe was wandering around the kitchen with his climbing clothes on. I contemplated faking death until it was too late for us to climb but then decided that I really wanted to go climbing instead.
I put on my clothes, the same ones I had been wearing all week. They smelled bad. Eye wateringly bad. When I'm on vacation I'm not about taking showers and being clean so I only brought one set of clothes to climb in. Joe's clothes smelled bad too. As we were hiking in to Mummy 1, back in Hyalite, I kept getting a whiff of my shirt through my down parka. I wanted to puke every time I smelled it. Also my boots were soaked, as were my mittens. And it was cold outside, probably around 5 degrees F.
That was my favorite approach, even though it was long and steep. You go around this bend, thinking the uphill will never ever stop, and suddenly there's the climb, all blue and shiny in the sun. It's like walking into your house after a long flight and finding someone has set up all your favorite sushi rolls on the kitchen table and you can't wait to sit down and eat them.
I should mention that we stopped half way up the approach because, shock and surprise, these two girls started yelling "Joe! Joe!" as we were walking by, and he stopped to talk to them. They were some girls he knows from town.
While we were getting our harnesses and crampons on Joe offered me a piece of a skor bar, which I've never had before. I ate it and Joe was immediately like "you don't really like it, do you?" I guess after a week of hanging out with me I'm pretty easy to read.
Mummy 1 wasn't a super hard climb, but I was tired and there were steep sections where my crampons were just shit. Also, it was covered with snow so it was hard to see where I was putting my feet. The first section was about 15 feet of vertical and I had to pull a screw out. I tried to get my feet in a good place but my left crampon kept blowing. I was cold and getting colder by the second. I couldn't get the fucking screw out easily because it had iced over on the top. My arms felt like ragged bath mats that someone should have throw away long ago.
After clearing that section I got into some super shit ice. Joe had warned me it was plating and to check my tools before I weighted them. I was trying to pull out the third screw on the route, and had my left ax in a pocket that was covered in snow so I couldn't really see the placement. My left crampon came out of the ice and I grabbed my left tool. Something tweaked in my shoulder and then the fucking ice plated out. I almost dropped my ice ax. My hands were so cold I could hardly close them but I managed to catch my tool.
When I got to the top of the climb Joe told me to look up. A big hawk of some kind was flying right over my head. It was beautiful. It reminded me of the time I saw a hawk climbing Power Play with Mayo. The wing span of the bird was huge.
I stumbled over to the anchor and looked out over the valley. Joe was pointing out ice climbs on the other side of the canyon and we could see two guys climbing over there. Then I looked behind me and saw Mummy 2 and the mountains. It's hard to exactly explain what that felt like but it's kind of like being at the airport waiting for a friend and suddenly you see them walking towards you and you're incredibly happy. So even though I climbed like shit I was very grateful to be standing on top of Mummy 1, seeing all the stuff that you can see from up there, and it was still more fun than anything else you can do.
After we rapped down we walked around so Joe could take pictures of some of the other climbs. We went into this super cool ice cave. Joe was thinking to climb the curtain that made up one wall of the ice cave but I was like I think my arms are going to fall off. He took a picture of one unnamed climb and then we talked about calling it "my legs are my albatross", a quote from an email
I got from Gadd. He's going to put it in the next guide book.On the way down we, shock and surprise, ran into a group of four guys who knew Joe. He gave them recommendations on where to take some mormon girls climbing. I've never fucked a mormon but I might so I could steal his underwear. They have secret underwear that no one is supposed to see. Then we talked about women who have bushy bushes that hang out the sides of their underwear. Joe said that is the ultimate boner shrinker.
When we got back to Joe's he gave me a grivel t-shirt. I suspect it's because the t-shirt I had been wearing while we weren't climbing was starting to smell. He also gave me these cool little rubber things that you use with a carabiner to provide an easy way to hook screws when you're cleaning a route.
That night we went to a restaurant where Joe is learning to cook. I had a bit of a crisis trying to find something to wear as I had driven out to Montana in a pajama top and didn't bring any non climbing clothes except for one shirt that got wet and gross at Chico hot springs. I ended up wearing my pajama top.
We sat at the bar. We ran into, shock and surprise, a bunch of people who know Joe. We picked a wine called guilty off the list and it was excellent and appropriate.
We were being kind of tired and low key until the restaurant owner's girlfriend Jen showed up. Joe said he thought we were similar characters. I agreed when, five minutes into the conversation, she executed the perfect insertion of the word "cunt" in an otherwise innocuous sentence.
I mentioned that I thought people should use the words cunt, twat, and pussy more often, as people usually just say dick, and look where that's gotten the world. Then she brought up the Imoto water study and how she thought it was shit that words can change things. Then I tried to remember the name of the movie about the Imoto water study and the bartender Nathaniel said "it's what the bleep do we know?". He really likes physics. I should mention here that Joe thought about getting a degree in physics but he found the course work boring. But he talks like an engineer which is funny. He was going on with this technical explanation about this ice curtain we were looking at climbing and finally I was like "so Joe, what you are saying is the ice is cracked?" What a geek.
I attempted to have a side conversation with Nathaniel about quantum physics and karate (he does muay thai which is similar to the karate form I studied, hisardut) while also talking to Jen about her chickens.
Until I had an organic egg, resulting in a discussion about eggs with Joe, I didn't realize a chicken doesn't have to get fucked to lay an egg. And then I found out from Jen you can buy eggs of any kind of chicken you want and put them in this machine that makes them hatch. I suggested that she write words on the eggs to test Imoto's theory. At first I was thinking "happy" and "sad" but then thought it wouldn't be good to have sad chickens. So I suggested she draw a penis on a few eggs and see if they came out roosters. She said that was manipulation and she didn't want to do that. And the eggs she has are expensive because they are an almost extinct breed, so we were thinking she should do the experiment with cheap eggs.
Then I went out and smoked and while doing that started thinking about the crystalline structures of ice and chaos theory and when I got back inside tried to explain a poorly expressed idea about studying chaos with ice so you could get a PhD but the whole time you would be ice climbing. Jen said my idea sucked. Then I started talking to Nathaniel about chaos and a tangent about how differential equations are fun but by that point we had finished the bottle of guilty and I don't remember what the fuck I was saying. I do remember Joe telling me that I should stop ordering my eggs by saying "I want them to be flat and cooked at the yellow part and not mixed in all together" and instead say "I want my eggs over hard" and me saying something inappropriate about over hard right as the chef that's teaching Joe how to cook walked out of the kitchen. He laughed and walked back in and Joe said "that was perfect timing".
Joe drove us home since I was kind of liquidated, but first we stopped by a gas station to get ingredients so Joe could make us Harriet's hot cakes, which is a special recipe his grandmother made up. We had to buy two eggs and some milk. Joe put the eggs in his down jacket pocket, which I wasn't sure was a great idea, especially when he was putting his seat belt on, but the eggs didn't break. I vaguely remember saying something about burned pancakes and how I would be really depressed if the pancakes were burned. I think we watched some sopranos when we got home, and we finished the bottle of red wine with the lady in the red dress on the label.
And Joe, ha ha, told me that night he was worried I was going to get bored hanging out with him.
Joe made hotcakes Saturday morning and they were perfect.
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