Took a trip up to Flagstaff this past weekend and had a nice relaxing time. We drove up Thursday night and stayed with Uncle Keto at his gorgeous ranch. We climbed Friday, chilled Saturday and then swam at the Aquaplex on Sunday. It was a nice trip and a great getaway from the heat. Only a week and a half and I’m up in VT running away from zombies!!! Can’t wait…

The next stop after our warm up was an area close to the parking lot called Puzzle Box. It’s a pretty long roof with a decent amount of problems and sits over a small cliff.  There was a V5 up there that Tommy and I wanted to tick off so we started working it while trying to keep the boys from falling over the side and tumbling down the hill. Well after a couple tries, Tommy was about to send the problem when he threw for the lip and his feet cut. It was interesting how things suddenly went in to slow motion as he swung out, lost his grip and started flying through the air OVER the cliff. I didn’t want him to dab by touching him so I was somewhat over to the side but I realized the magnitude of the situation and reached my hand out trying to grab him. He yelled “OH SHIT” in mid air while simultaneously grabbing my arm yanking me with him and we both went crashing over the side. We didn’t go very far down because while dragging me along slowed him down, he was also able to grab a small tree and break his tumble. After a few seconds, I started laughing hysterically and Henry thought I was crying and ran over yelling “Mommy are you ok!!?? What’s wrong Mommy!??” It. was. hilarious. Tommy banged up his knee and while being dragged down the cliff, my shoe came off and I scraped the bottom of my foot. Other than that, we were fine but decided not to take another chance and packed it up to head to a safer place. That was our big brush with death this weekend!!! Haha.

Hey everyone! How was your Thanksgiving? Ours was great – we spent it up in the beautiful town of Bishop CA among the snow covered peaks and kick ass boulders. We had a wonderful trip…although it was plagued with a few mishaps but they didn’t ruin the overall experience. I got some sort of rib injury that had me stuffing aspirin down my gob every 6 or so hours, Will fell in the trailer and got a bloody nose and black eye, Tommy screwed up his finger by smashing it in a bathroom stall and then twisting his ankle on a warm-up problem and somehow Henry got away scott free, although he did have a really bad cough from a previous cold. Top that off with ALL of us having colds, coughing our lungs up and being somewhat miserable health wise. Tommy’s cold has also morphed into a sinus infection and he’s started blowing blood out his nose. Haha. It’s hilarious to read all this. Yes, we are a MESS. =)

Aside from our ailments, the weather turned out to be fantastic and we didn’t have one bad day except our first day which was rainy and gloomy at first but quickly turned sunny after the noon hour. It was amazing. The boys were in Heaven running around getting dirty, throwing rocks and meeting new and crazy/interesting people. A couple of our good buddies, Eric and Gus, joined us out there and then we had a couple other friends come during the middle of the week.  We also met a lot of great people out there that we bouldered with as well. One guy, Greg, was from Washington and brought his beautiful dog Lya out with him. Then we met some guys from Germany who were absolutely hysterical…they were the coolest/strongest guys around. I’m kind of dissapointed with the pictures we got because some of them don’t reflect these people which I would have loved to capture, but running around after two little boys while trying to climb and take pictures and video is a tall order. We’ve decided that we’ll have to invite someone next time to strictly be our photographer/videographer. (Dawn…what are you doing next Thanksgiving?? HAHA! Just kidding – you’ve got WAY TOO MUCH on your plate. =)

Anyway, this was a wonderful trip and we had a real hard time coming home and facing reality. We’re gonna take a month or so off to try and get healthy before we get back into pulling hard. I’ve got a lot of projects I want to try out in Hueco next year and we’ll hopefully be taking another trip up to Bishop sometime next year as well to send some projects. So much to do!! It’s hard to force ourselves to rest, but we have a lot going on right now in terms of our personal lives as well as those around us, so it’s time to step back and focus on our loved ones.

Hope you all are well out there. Take care and Talk soon.

A couple Christmases ago, Holly bought us the New England Bouldering Guide, knowing that it would entice us to get our butts up there to go climbing. We obviously wanted to climb during this trip (even though we were both injured – boo) but didn’t know how we were going to get crash pads. I got a hold of one of the owners of the rock climbing gym in Burlington and she said that she would get some pads for us to rent. This was a couple months ago. Fast forward to our trip – I hadn’t heard from her since then so when we arrived in VT, I called asking about them and the guy on the line said that they didn’t rent any out. So…I guess there was a mix up of information and we figured we wouldn’t be getting any pads. I wasn’t about to give up, so Tom and I drove up the mountain to Smugglers Notch hoping we would find some other boulderers that could help us out. After about an hour of exploring, we ran into a couple of guys, Lex and Sam, who turned out to be our salvation. After introducing ourselves and explaining our situation, they told us to come out the next day and climb with them and we could use their pads. We were thrilled…and they turned out to be the nicest guys ever! We kind of adopted Lex as our brother and we ended up hanging out with him a lot during the trip. He’s a snowboard instructor in Stowe during the winter and bouldering has become his summer sport. He invited us to come back to VT early next year for some free private snowboarding lessons! How cool is that!? So we told him that he would have to come down to Tucson during the mud season next year so we could take him to Hueco. Needless to say, we got to do some bouldering up on the Notch and it was great. My ankle did pretty well and Tommy’s finger didn’t bug him too much. We were just happy we got to get outside and meet some really cool people.