Vegas Life

After dropping Camille off at the airport I had a day to myself. I spent most of it trying to figure out how to do things on my own again. An adjustment period for sure. I'm trying to continue cooking good and healthy meals but she did it so much better!

My Uncle Mark flew into town from Boston so we could spend some time together as well as see my Great Uncle Jack (His Uncle). Here's the 3 of us in the hotel room.

Our hotel room for the first night was far from modest (my Uncle's choosing as I've never even set foot in a suite like this before).

We spent 5 days together, mostly catching up. Unfortunately my Uncle is very sick at the moment. Thankfully I was able to provide some assistance and hopefully he is on a good course toward recovery.

After he flew back home I made my way back into the mountains. Being on the strip for 5 days was pretty much my limit for city life.

Since then I've been working a lot on building a new website to showcase my photography as well as my programming skills. Yup, I think I'm going to start looking for jobs soon and I kind of need a portfolio. It feels really good to be programming again.

Been climbing with Sara a lot as well as her friends Jordan and Jess. We climbed some hard sport routes and bouldered. This boulder is called Porkchop for hopefully obvious reasons. Photo: Sara.

For our rest day we decided to climb Solar Slab, a 1,700 foot tall 12-pitch 5.6. With a 45 minute approach, 2 hour climb and 2.5 hour descent it wasn't exactly a good rest day activity. Either way it was a blast. In this photo below, Solar Slab is the big white wall on the right side of the left-most canyon (did you follow all that?).

A 3-pitch 5.3 gully at the beginning got us nice and warmed up.

This is maybe halfway up the route. Some interesting and fun laybacks.

The 200 foot crack towards the top was solid and kept us quite focused.

The summit! Photo: Sara.

There were many descent options, but most required a rope which we were lacking. We found a good option that required some 5.5 downclimbing, climbing back up, shimmying down chimneys and finally descending a large low-angle slab. Somehow we didn't get lost and were back to the car before 2:00!

Sara and I are both getting a little antsy and might head to Bishop, CA in a couple days for some bouldering in the East Sierras. Stay tuned!