Birthday: June 21
Hometown: Nashville, TN
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Contact: Meghan@alt9.net

Climbing at Moonstone Beach rocks!  We got up bright and early this morning and finished the trip through the very beautiful Redwood Forests and hit the beach for our first beach climbing of the trip. We had no idea what we were climbing and it didn't matter. It was great. We found some nice problems, pretty tricky, and we working most of them out.  No swimming for us though. The swimming gear for this place is a wetsuit. That's right, it's cold!!!  We had a great little kid sneaking around following us with mud all over his body. He looked like a little warrior. We told him we were climbing warriors too, just with white all over our hands and faces instead of brown. He liked that.  We stayed for sunset even as the fog moved in. For a brief couple of minutes we caught the shining fuchsia red sun peaking through the haze. Amazing day. 

We're getting pretty used to sleeping in the car these days, so we'll probably do it again sometime tonight.

 
Studying the waves

getting soaked. Once we managed to pass we enjoyed the amazingly calm surroundings and climbed away. Everything we did was pretty easy, but we didn't care. One of the coolest problems was the last of the day where I climbed an arête that started a few feet off the ground and ended nearly thirty feet high. I didn't realize where I had gotten to until I was at the very peak and went to topout and glanced below. Whoa! Way too high to try to climb over, time for a down climb. I got my fear in for the day. Then it was time to march up the death trip. The plants had all grown in the direction we were coming from and their branches rejected the crash pad (and me) over and over. Lost Rocks- home of the most treacherous access we've ever seen.

But that looks SO far away

It's time for a hotel tonight.  We're tired, dirty, and everything needs recharging including us.  Other than with mom it's only our second hotel of the trip. Not bad for a month and a half.  Maybe one of these days we'll even get around to washing our clothes.

After leaving the airport a little teary eyed we headed to the Portland Rock Gym. Awesome place- not only was the climbing great, but it was free! We happened upon a free Friday bouldering fiasco.  I'll let Danielle tell all about it, but it was great. We climbed with cool people and had one of our best sending days ever.  It's nice to feel strong every once in a while. Big thanks to Ken(ny) for his generousity. He even almost convinced us to spend another day in Portland, but Smith Rocks is calling!

Bend, Oregon is pretty cool. We haven't seen much yet, but we had some great ice cream! We're taking the afternoon off to let our hands recover and we saw that there's a great concert tonight (Damien Rice and Fiona Apple). We don't have nearly enough cash, so we'll see if we can work our magic to get in. Fingers crossed.

After the concert we took off for Smith Rock, luckily not as far away as we thought.  The rock here is insane!  I haven't seen anything like it before. There are no trees anywhere, just huge spires of rock.  From far away it all seems fairly climbable, but when you get close you realize it's a completely different story. The rock is so different.  It looks like someone took a slingshot, loaded it with crazy-glue covered pebbles, and shot them at the huge faces.  Really, there are these little nubs all over the place.  It's taking some time to get used to. I don't even know how to hold on to those little things.  My first route up was definitely a little sketchy and I had the look of a Smith Rock newbie (luckily no one was around, but I'm sure I looked the part).  Danielle didn't seem to have a problem and she scurried right up the rock.  I tell you what, bouldering is great and all, but when you're doing it exclusively it really messes you up when you get back to the big walls.  My endurance wasn't shot (not that it was really tested) but leading felt weird to say the least.  I really wish our friends Aya and Dylan were here to climb with us- they would surely make it an even better time. I can say with quite a bit of confidence that one of my best meals ever was in the middle of nowhere, NH camping with these two. You owe us big time for ditching out, dinner maybe??

And I'm really disappointed to announce that my favorite and only pair of flip-flops for nearly four years are shot from pushing in far too many tent stakes. They do however have a nice X pattern permanently pressed into the rubber if anyone cares to have them as a decoration.

So we didn't see much of Smith Rock, but we certainly climbed the heck out of the forty yards of rock we were on.  And, on the  way out we saw the smallest little fawn.  It hid the moment it saw us, but another deer stood still right in front of us long enough to get pictures.  It's ears were huge! I think if I were an animal, I would be a deer. A white-tailed deer.

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