Day 21

We awoke to the friendly voice of a park ranger telling us we were not allowed to camp in the lot without paying. He was a nice old man though and was just doing his job. Alex and i repacked our car and went back to Yosemite Valley to climb on the small rocks. Bouldering in The Valley is world class and way less of a production than Big Wall climbing.

Barefoot Bouldering

San Fran

Not the Golden Gate

After climbing, we made our way to San Francisco to meet Alex's fellow Penn State Architectural Engineer, Alyse, for the Penguins game. She is from Pittsburgh and a pretty huge hockey fan. Crosby and the gang took care of business in "Hockeytown" and the San Francisco bar we were at was generally stoked. Alyse and I got a little frisky with a couple of Red Wings fans, but they backed down on account of my huge biceps and strong core. We returned to Alyse's to set up camp. We topped the night off with a swim in the famously warm Pacific Ocean.

Outside Alyse's. Ocean at the end of the road

Day 17

Dawn in Zion is something everyone should witness. The colors and textures the rising sun highlights on the rock is striking. I watched the hues morph as I iced my swollen ankle on a picnic table.
Alex soon awoke too with our hundreds of neighbors at the packed campground already getting rowdy. Another day on the run as we packed and left Zion for a more wholesome place… Las Vegas. We sadly passed by the world-renowned sport climbing of the Virgin River Gorge and Red Rocks, NV but we are slightly pressed for time and I don’t mind having reason to fly into Vegas for another visit. We approached the city form the east and headed straight for the strip. We got some zany pictures of all the commotion. The delicate suggestions of nude dudes and chicks popped out everywhere.



Wild times. We tried our luck at the slots ($4 dollars worth), ate cheap sandwiches at a food court, snuck into a ritzy hotel pool to scope some babes (which we hadn’t seen in weeks), and even tied to swing a cheap room at the plush Encore hotel and casino. A couple dollars less but 10 prostitute trading cards more we left with little else to speak of (“what happens in Vegas….”).

Just one more dollar! Please!

The next 100 miles or so were spent regretting and trying to justify our decision to leave Sin City so quickly, a true representation of our unwavering morality. We crossed through some plains of Nevada then dove into the eastern Sierras of California. We passed through a bristlecone pine forest, home to the oldest living organisms in the world (some of the trees up to 4,500 years old.) The dusty roads of this desert dissolved behind us and we finally made it to Bishop, CA. Probably seems an unlikely destination to most, but climbers know it to be the highball bouldering capital of America. We set up a lovely campsite in the shadow of the Sierras, still covered in snow, and next to the mammoth boulders of the Buttermilk Area. We watched Chris Sharma and friends kill it in Bishop and elsewhere in his featured film King Lines.

Sierras in the background

A BIG boulder field

Day 9

St. Louis was a great stop but it was time for us to make big moves to the big country. We planned to cross Missouri, Kansas, and eastern Colorado in a day's jaunt to stay with my cousin Mikey (aka Nevko) while exploring the Rockies. We anticipated a long day of driving across these desolate plains which left us feeling... well, flat, but we decided early on to make the most of it. Trips across Kansas are notorious for their mind-numbing blandness, but their are definitely a few hidden gems just out of sight that few travelers may know about. We zipped through Kansas City and Topeka with little much to speak of except for the general beauty of the two cities surrounded by desolation.

Our first detour was about 15 miles of barren dirt roads south of I-70 to Mushroom Rock State Park.

The featured sights rose up to 25 feet out of the otherwise featureless fields around. The weirdness was almost overwhelming.
The fungus shaped natural statues carved by wind erosion the soft sandstone were jaw dropping.

The smaller shroom (with the "I Love Mom" etching) lent itself to an intense bouldering session that ended in Alex sending to stand on top of the cap (possible First Ascent?). I left most of the skin on my forearms and biceps back at the crux move along with my pride.


We took off back down the dirt roads for the interstate but couldn't quite make it to the safety of the 4-lane without a cop dropping the mighty hammer of justice on us. He was more curious of why the heck we were in these parts than anything and we got off scott-free.

We moved on down the road past signs marketing "world's largest prairie dog," "rattlesnake jewelery," and "6-legged steer." Cheezy but their was not a chance in hell we could pass on such fantasies. The exit revealed that the tourist trap was closed at 8:30PM on a Sunday. Go figure. We snuck a peak in a broken part of the fencing around back to see some prairie dogs, none of which appeared to be the largest in the world as promised.


Bummer, but we pressed onward as the Indians and settlers had done so many years before. We stopped at a Buffalo Bill statue where Alex bouldered a large bronze buffalo. It was awkward.


Afterwards, we traveled to yet another stop 30 miles off the interstate as the sun began to set. We passed thorough herds of thousands of free-ranging cattle that littered the road to Monument Rocks National Monument.

Again it was the something rising out of nothing effect that made these so impressive. The cliffs are made from extremely soft chalk remaining from an ancient sea and were again created by the whipping winds of the plains. The photos speak for themselves.

Alex standing at the base of some spires.

On one of the spires we found a colony of swallows with their mud nests constructed under the overhung cliff.

The Real Gateway to the West

We saw a rattlesnake, 2 coyotes, pheasants, and mule deer running around as well. The sun set as we pulled out with over 3 hours of fast driving remaining to pull into Colorado Springs by midnight. Exhaustion carried us straight to sleep after a smile recalling the real Kansas that few still attempt to explore.