Owens River Gorge

Owens River Gorge - 10 Leads in a Weekend

December 14-17, 2017

At the end of November, I signed up for a Meetup trip to the Owens River Gorge. At the time, there were 5 or 6 people signed up, and I assumed that about a week before the trip, half a dozen more would join if no other, more appealing events popped up. What actually happened was that gradually it dwindled down to the organizer, me, and one other woman. About a week before the trip the organizer emailed us, and she responded to him indicating that she didn’t want to go because it was too close to Christmas. He and I were still excited to go, and to be honest, I was actually more excited then, because that meant less time just sitting around and more time climbing. 7-8 hours is a long time to drive for the typical Meetup experience of maybe lead one easy thing, toprope a couple things, and spend the rest of the time talking and eating snacks. I was somewhat apprehensive about having to spend all day climbing with no rests, but that turned out to not be a problem. We didn’t start as early as I was expecting, and we finished fairly early due to the narrow window of sun in the Gorge providing comfortable climbing temperatures.

Starting up Breaking Wind, right before belaying really required two hands ( --- More (2056 words) --- )