February 7, 2010

Interesting day on the 1st

Sarah and I went hiking yesterday to let her try out her new trekking poles (which worked out quite well) and walked by the base of the first Flatiron – which for non-Boulder folks is a big 1500 foot chunk of rock just above town that people like to climb on. It’s about 5.5, but it’s a giant slab, so it’s kinda freaky if you’re not used to that sort of thing.

In any case, we saw a young lady about 100 feet up, clinging to a little tree and looking totally terrified – she apparently had been “bouldering”, and rather than jump off when she was unable to reverse the first few moves, had continued up in hopes of traversing off higher up. Not a great plan.

Long story short, I’m glad we use old daisy chains as dog leashes, and that I’ve spent a lot of time scrambling around on the flatirons – I was able to basically put her on belay (using a loop of webbing as a chest harness) from stances and talk her down, section by section. Quite an exciting day for everyone, unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures.