The Secret

Good afternoon, faithful readers. Today I send you greetings from Laramie, Wyoming. Laramie is the home of the University of Wyoming and, apparently, not much else. We started off on the wrong foot with Laramie when we arrived here at around 11 p.m. on Wednesday night looking for a late-night eating establishment willing to serve us large quantities of food. Being a college town, we thought this would be no problem. Wrong. After about 45 minutes we managed to find what turned out to be the town's only 24-hour restaurant, Shari's. Thank goodness for Shari's. And for pancakes.

Now before I get into what we've been up to for the past few days, I thought some of you might be wondering what we do all day. So, let me give you a quick run-down of a typical day. It's pretty simple really. Thomas gets up and makes the coffee. I get up and drink the coffee. Breakfast consists of a banana and cereal or a bagel. We pack up the gear for the day. We go climbing all day long. We come back to the truck and make dinner which typically consists of couscous or pasta. After this there is a certain amount of sitting around, reading, or sometimes playing Scrabble (Yes, we have a travel Scrabble set; I am not ashamed to admit it.) Then comes the important part. And now, my friends, I am going to share with you the secret to a successful climbing trip:

Nutella. I hope you are taking notes. The nutella should be applied generously to bread or a tortilla, along with some peanut butter (and perhaps some cereal if you have it available). Like this:

Follow this simple plan and I guarantee your next climbing trip will be a success. Or any trip for that matter. Or, even if you're not traveling, your life will simply be a little better.

But enough about that. In my last post I told you that we were planning to visit Fremont Canyon in central Wyoming. This was definitely a new experience for both Thomas and I. The climbing here involves rappeling into the canyon, trying to keep your rope out of the water, and climbing out.

The tricky part here, as you can see, is that you are above water. So, if you pick the wrong spot to rappel in, you may end up at the base of something you can't climb out. And it's not as though you can walk along the base of the wall to find your route. We spent several good hours the evening we arrived just trying to figure out where the climbs we wanted to try were located.

We thought we had at least one portion of the area figured out but rapping in the next day to the base of what we thought was the first route we wanted to climb was still somewhat intimidating. Fortunately, we were right! The climbing at Fremont was definitely unique and we did some very high quality lines there, including, Thanatos, a very interesting 5.10b:

Wine and Roses (5.11a) a really beautiful splitter hand crack that alone would have made our stop at Fremont worthwhile:

Thomas led these lines and a couple of others on our first day at Fremont and I did most of the leading the second day--the best of which was a nice 5.9 hand crack in a dihedral called B-52.

The perils of climbing cracks on sharp granite! After two days of climbing at Fremont, Thomas and I were both ready to move on to our next stop. Fremont definitely had a unique feel and was a worthwhile stop. It is very remote and the act of rapping in over the water, hoping you are over the right line gives it a certain mystique.

Next stop, Vedauwoo, the land of wide cracks!

Thomas displays the essential gear for climbing here, big cams! Vedauwoo is another unique place made up of what appears to be giant granite blobs. Getting to the climbing involves quite a bit of scrambling around, but after a bit of fumbling about yesterday morning, we managed to find some nice lines:

Thomas at the base of MRC Direct (5.9, 2 pitches), which brought us to The Straight Edge (5.9+). Our first introduction to the wide cracks at Vedauwoo. After this introduction (and more scrambling) we found some other interesting lines that gave us a good introduction to the place.

The climbing here is hard. I have definitely felt that my climbing has improved over the last couple of weeks but yesterday was a humbling experience which showed me how far I still have to go. Climbing has a way of keeping me humble like that. When I start to feel more comfortable or that I am seeing improvements there typically seems to be something that shows me how far I have to go. I guess that is part of what keeps us coming back for more.

Today is a rest day and then we plan to spend 3 or 4 more days climbing here before heading back to the Southeast. Time flies when you're climbing so much good stuff. It's hard to believe we have been on the road for nearly a month now.

Thanks for reading!