Camping/Climbing, a DIFFERENT way...

This past weekend I went camping and climbing down at Smith Rock (for all you people who live out here and know where that is). For all the other folks out there, it's about a three hour car ride through a winding mountain road from Corvallis. Now, I am a very experienced camper, and I have been on many different styles of camping trips, from eating steaks out of a car and having bathrooms with flush toilets and showers to eating granola at 10,000 feet where you have pack out EVERYTHING, including your TP. So, I thought I was ready for this. And that's where I was wrong.The changes started before we even left. One of the guys was packing the back of his truck and brought a grill. Not like a little, small grill, no, a huge, full-sized charcoal grill. He also brought three mountain bikes and a couple other things that will be mentioned later.

Once we got there on Friday night, I noticed something else: While starting the grill, I'm used to using a charcoal chimney with newspaper to start the coals going, but this guy used the ultimate cheating weapon: lighter fluid. This was weird because I grew up being told that lighter fluid is cheating by both my parents and the entire Boy Scout community. But here this guy was using it to start both the fire AND the coals. But enough of that, on to the climbing.

Climbing involved a lot of sitting (or sleeping in my case) waiting for a route to be open and then set up. To climb, someone good (in this case Matt) has to "lead climb" to set up a rope to the top, letting all of us inexperienced climbers do it the easy way. we started out on a pretty "easy" wall, at least in terms of ratings. However, the beginning move was too hard for me and I didn't have the finger strength to do it. The second route that we set up was actually harder, and I belayed a couple people for the beginning, but once again, the beginning was too hard and no one but the two experienced climbers made it up. Finally, the easy wall that we wanted to start on opened up. This route I finally did climb, and I didn't even cheat! This left me feeling at least a little better about myself.

So, general conclusions from the trip: napping in the sun gives you sunburn, the cab of a pickup is NOT comfortable for 4 large guys, Climbing is hard and requires ridiculous finger strength, and charcoal chimney's are the way to go for effective charcoal-starting.