Climbing Family Adventures

On Friday, Adam, Odub & I went for a paddle as part of Adam’s “rest day”.  Colter Bay has canoes for rent so we headed out on Jackson Lake & canoed around an island.  Other than that, it was a pretty relaxing day, including some laundry, hammock sitting, & generally relaxing.  Adam & Jeff went to bed at 6:00 since they were waking up at midnight to climb the Grand. Cool duck thing we saw I promise he had more fun than this picture seems! His favorite thing... hands in the water! Naps in the tetons :) Fencing lessons from Jefe On Saturday Odub & I headed to Jenny Lake to hike to the boat launch.  Due to a surprise trail closure, our 1.5 flat walk around the lake with optional extra ½ mile up to a waterfall turned into a mandatory 2.8 mile hike with several hundred feet of elevation change.  Odub was a champ for most of it though, and he loved the shuttle boat ride back to the vis...

After some fun times at the Lander City Park playground (which is awesome! And they have free camping there if you need a place to camp) we headed up to Wild Iris to camp and climb. The camping is down a  horrible  dirt road, but is free and each site has a bear proof container for food/trash and a lot of the sites have amazing views!  Added bonus: you can walk to climbing super easily.  After setting up camp we headed to the Blooming Rose area to get on a few climbs.  The pocketed limestone makes for interesting climbing, it’s super hard to tell if what you’re reaching for is going to be a bucket or some useless dish.  We got on a really hard feeling 8 and a 10b that Jeff declared was the hardest thing we climbed all 3 days (including 2 11s we got on the next day!) so the grades can be interesting. Our next day there started with pancake breakfast!    Then we headed down to the Rodeo Drive area.    ...

Reliable internet has been a little hard to come by recently, so I'm going to make a quick, text only update. Katie will make a more detailed posting soon with pictures.  We had an amazing time climbing at Wild Iris. The climbing was great fun - although the grades were a little all over the place - and the camping was amazing. We lucked out and managed to get a tent site just a few minutes away from some of the best climbing. Managed not to blow our fingers on the steep, pockety limestone, and headed to the Tetons after 3 days.  News flash: it's hard to find camping in Yellowstone and the Tetons during the summer! The advantage of not having a set plan for our trip is that we can let the weather and our desires dictate where we go each day. However, it also means that we don't have set places to stay each night. We got laughed at when we tried to find camping in Yellowstone, but decided to just try our luck at one of the larger Park Service campgrounds in the Tetons...

Got in some climbing at Clear Creek Canyon on Thursday with Nate.  Good fun in a beautiful canyon!  After a good morning of climbing we headed to my cousin Rachel’s house to visit her family.  It was great to see her and Odub had a great time playing with her kids (OK, maybe being handed/thrown toys by her son…. They didn’t actually interact overly much since they were both being shy) and as an added bonus we got to see my Aunt Jane and Uncle Barry (who took the pictures) and other cousin Becky. Unfortunately, there was a sad reason all this family was here, Rachel’s husband Denis recently passed away.  He was a great guy and we all will miss him a lot. Then it was off to Vedauwoo where we met up with Jeff.  First day in Vedauwoo we went to the Beehive, the only sport area there, and managed to get on 6 climbs before thunderstorms rolled in despite the crowds.  Fun climbing and Odub even took a nap! After a y...