Updates and photos from the Travels of Mason and Eva!
So… It’s been a while since I updated the blog! My apologies… But better late than never in my opinion.
Since my last post, lots has happened! The Outdoor Retailer Trade Show (I think I remember some of it), a few days in Vedauwoo (the outcomes of this trip were scars from shoving ourselves in stupidly wide cracks, mice that thought they owned Eva, and a two inch laceration on my finger), lots of driving through Montana, Idaho, and Washington, and a couple of great weekends of climbing!
To start things out, we ended up going bouldering in Little Cottonwood Canyon before OR. It was about 100 degrees. Needless to say, climbing didn’t last very long and resulted in us drinking beer by the pool, which turned into general shenanigans (involving random objects and climbing/falling over a couple of fences) till about four o’clock in the AM.
The next morning, whether we liked it or not, we had to assemble the evolv booth. The awesome part about this was that we didn’t have any instructions, and only one person out of our group had put it together before. So after scratching our heads and looking lost for about 3 hours, this is what we had come up with:
A good start, right?! Yeah… Not so much! It only took eight more hours to figure out the rest of the booth. Don’t worry, this is pretty standard operating procedure for booth set-up. A huge thanks to the set up team!
After assembling the booth and decompressing for a bit, we migrated back to the hotel where I proceeded to get into a fight with a couple of bottle caps
If you ever wanted to know what happens to your stomach/shoulder when a projectile (the bottle cap) is moving at a rapid rate of speed (FAST!!!) and makes contact with skin (upper right stomach and right shoulder), look closely at the above shot… Don’t let the face fool you, I was in a state of shock and it actually produced bruises the next day.
After the show, I headed East to Vedauwoo, WY. If you have ever climbed off-width, this is the Yosemite of off-widths; beautiful large grain granite with thousands of 4”-to-WIDE cracks (and a fair number of thinner, but still a ton of fun and more enjoyable, lines).
I’ve been coming to Vedauwoo for about 20 years now, and each time I leave bloodied, bruised and feeling totally taken advantage of, but for some reason I keep coming back. There’s something about shoving your arm, shoulder deep into a crack, grunting your way up the rock, that draws me here. It is truly an awesome feeling when you are racked up with nothing smaller than a #5, and an even better one when you flop, like a beached whale, onto the top of these climbs, panting, groaning, and writhing in pain.
With the grunt-fest out of the way, it was time to crawl back to camp, lick our oozing hands, and delve into a bottle of JD
After we finished reminiscing our exploits of the day, we discovered that a posse of mice had taken over Eva… I have no clue how these mice entered the van, seeing that there is a 15” gap between the door and the ground, but our only conclusion that made sense, at the time, was that these were specially trained Ninja Mice that were able to use advanced jumping techniques that us humans can’t even fathom. After much discussion, we decided to do the in-humane thing and set 4 mouse traps around each wheel. By the end of the night, we had heard and cleared 15 snaps of the traps.
We repeated the process of the day a few more days. On the last day, I managed to slice the inside of my middle finger while removing a tape glove. Needless to say, I felt like an idiot and total amateur. This has resulted in me not climbing for almost three weeks while I passed some of the best rock in Montana and Idaho! Fortunately, I am made of flesh and bone, and both of these things heal… for the most part!
I spent a weekend at Banks Lake, WA with the Mountain Gear crew. It was a great reintroduction to climbing…pure granite slab awesomeness!
So now I am up in Ririe, ID hanging out with one of our athletes, Dean Lords, and his wonderful wife, Heather. He has consecutively kicked my A$$ two days in a row on fantastic tuff bouldering and steep limestone sport routes.
And the phenomenal crag dog, Tessie!
Anywho, that’s all I’ve got for now!
