Owen River Gorge Take One

It was a late start on Friday as we accidentally drove north of the Owen River Gorge entrance. Driving on the 395 from Bishop towards Mammoth Lakes, you should take the Paradise Swall Meadows exit and not the more appropriately named Owens River Gorge exit which will actually spit you out atht the north side of the gorge. After finally finding the correct exit from the 395, we arrived at the 2nd parking area with a steep downward approach. The temperature was cold, probably the 40s and we only had time to do one climb. I lead Clip Jr 5.6. It was so cold my fingers became numb halfway up. I realized this as I was able to torque my fingers into holds without much pain at all. The return ascent back up to the car was killer on the quads. I'll need to return to this place when the sun is out and the temps are warmer.

Holcomb Valley Trip

Our Holcomb Valley trip Sat and Sun. Brian, Wes, Jen and I leave San Diego early in the morning at 8am, aka 10am realistic time. We all pile our gear into Brian's Toyota Rav4 and head north on the 15 towards Big Bear and then into up the dirt road into Holcomb Valley. We arrived at the Pinnacles around noon and after a quick bite to eat we hiked towards the crag.

We had no guide book, but I do remember my last Holcomb trip where I did my first lead climb on Coyotes at Sunset. We arrived back at the same area, Coyote Crag. For some reason I was feeling super confident and started out leading and on sighted Bye Crackie.

I then moved over to the far left of the face and attempted to on-sight Black Magic Poodle. I fell leading it and took a small swing. As I fell I, by instinct, grabbed the rope and caught my fall. I don't have much experience leading or falling on a lead so that is something I need to get better at. Luckily the rope burn wasn't too bad as my calloused hands were able to take the blunt of the burn. After figuring out the sequence I was able to finish the route.

After my defeat, I headed back over to the right side of Coyote and led Coyotes at Sunset. I finished up the day with a top rope of Golden Poodle.

• Bye Crackie Lead 5.7 (link)
• Black Magic Poodle Lead/Fall 5.9 (link)
• Coyotes at Sunset Lead 5.8 (link)
• Golden Poodle TR 5.9 (link)

As the sun sank into the distance we walk back to the car. After realizing that we would need to move both Wes' and Brian's crash pads to the roof and re-pack the Rav4 before being able to drive down to the official campsites, we decided to setup camp at the pinnacles. The only downside is that there are no fires allowed.

As Jen and I unpack the car and setup the tent, Brian and Wes head back to the Central Pinnacles where he has a cell phone signal and is able to text the rest of our group. Only downside is that they locked the door to the Rav4, which had all our clothes and food. Its two hours later by the time we decide to go looking for them. Jen decides to stay with a group of campers near the entrance, while I hike back towards the climbing area looking for them in shorts and flip flops. Its cold, but at least the hike warms me up.

About half way between the entrance and the Central Pinnacles, I run into Wes and Brian. We quick head back to the camp to make food.

The second day started out early as the sun rose and entered the tent. After a quick cup of instant coffee, oatmeal and some more beef jerky we headed back towards the Central Pinnacles. On the way there, Wes noticed a climb that was really interesting. I have yet to identify this route, but is it on the left side of the trail shortly after leaving the main parking area. There is a single bolt and then on the left there is a crack that moves diagonally up and to the left. Wes led this route and protected with a Green .75 Black Diamond Camalot C4. At the top he set 3 cams for the anchor. I was able to flash it after watching Wes and Brian climb it.

After the unidentified route. We hiked towards Gold Wall. There we went for the Gold Standard as the first climb. Its 7 bolt 80ft pitch that looked to disappear up and to the left. Even after hearing it was 5.6 I decided to top rope it first before attempting to lead. Because of its height it was much easier than it looked to lead.

As I was climbing Gold Rush a group of climbers to the left of us on, what I later discovered to, Pistol Pete. That area is called Doc Holiday Wall which has some intimidating looking climbs that overlook the entire valley. Wes led Pistol Pete and I was able to top rope it. There were several difficult parts for me. The start where smearing was needed to get to the first bolt and the undercling transition to the right were both cruxes for me.

• <unidentified> TR
• Gold Standard TR 5.6 (link)
• Gold Standard Lead 5.6
• Pistol Pete 5.10a (link)

Now that I have found some better resources for route, I can't wait to head back and try some more climbs. Maybe this time we can plan it a little better so that we are in the shade more of the time and not get so sunburned.

So who brought the coke?

I booked a tour of Wadi Rum through the Valentine Hotel. I wasn’t sure if this was a rip off or not, but after arriving in Petra it seems that people were paying twice as much as I paid for the same tour. We have six people crammed in our Land Rover Discovery SUV. There is no AC just windows-down driving.



There are many other SUVs along our same tour and we end up seeing a lot of the same people over and over again. I meet up another American, Eric, who was on the same route toward Egypt. We ended up seeing each other at most of the various stone formations. At the rock bridge we both end up meeting a third American, Thu, a Seattleite who was visiting Jordan while she was working in Alexandria, Egypt.





When I was talking to Thu she talked about how she had just met another American from Kansas City. I described Brian and it turns out that they had met each other previously. I ended up having to leave hatefully from the last attraction because our group was late for another appointment. But Brian and Thu ended up see each other again and Brian was able to give me her contacts.



Our next stop is a Bedouin camp. Here we will spend the night in the tents and see both the sunset and sunrise. The Wadi Rum sunset and sunrise was amazing. The visibility was far and the landscape was bare and peaceful. The red rock color slowly changed various shades of red and orange. I took a barefoot walk around our Bedouin camp exploring all the wildlife that lived around us. There were countless lizards, 4x4 wheel tracks, snake tracks and lizard tracks throughout the area.



The night at Bedouin Camp is cold. When the sun sets the dry hot environment changed to darkness and cold. The atmosphere became completely quiet and there were no lights to be seen. The landscape felt calm and peaceful. This is the reason this place is called the Bedouin meditation camp. The moon lit the surroundings and we all decided to take a talk by moonlight. It was surprising how well lit the moon light was and desert was clearly visible.



That night we all sleep under double blankets. They were so heavy that it felt like you were trapped under the covers. I had the best sleep ever that night and nearly missed the sunrise. Dawn approaches by laying a layer of fogginess across the desert. The colors are grayed and slowly increase in saturation as the sun appears. One of the most beautiful sights so far. I would probably rate this higher than Petra.

I'm gonna climb that mountain

It is really chill scenes hear in Olympos. The entire setup is relaxing. There are elevated seating area platforms with pillows all around. It is really easy to lounge around all day. With a full service restaurant and service to your seat it was really easy to waste away entire days just relaxing. The second day of our stay Matt, Ennes, Casey and I decided to go conquer one of the peaks that overlook the Olympos road and ocean. And conquer we did, with exception for Matt who probably has more sense than the other three that continued.





The rocks were hard and held up under weight unlike the sandstone material we were use to climbing in Cappadocia. These rocks however were jaggedly sharp from the wear which on one hand created really good foot and hand grips, but on the other hand cut the crap out of your hands and boots. The climbing was challenging and fun. We ended up accidentally going down the wrong cliff and had to come down a rock quarry looking valley. I was glad I wore my boots this time around as we were pretty much rock surfing down the side of the mountain. With each step a good chuck of rock would slide down with us, enjoyable at first, it got really old. The trek up and down took the better part of a day but the view at the top was well worth it.



The rest of afternoon was spent on the beach relaxing, until someone decided it was a good idea to have a rock skipping contest. The beach here is like the one at Nice, France. Full of water polished round rocks. I think Casey, Ennes and I spent a lot more time than I would like to admit trying to see who could get more skips in a row. I think Ennes won with 13 or something like that.

The Best Idea Ever: Night Climbing on Sandstone

That night Casey and I still had energy left over and we decided to do some night exploring. It started out as a joke that we would do some exploring and climbing at night, but then after thinking about it for a while it actually sounded like a scary/fun idea. So we are both armed with a flash light and hike towards the first set of valleys.



The moon is out and we are able to seem most of the areas by moonlight. We picked out a smaller non-life threatening rock and start to climb. We take turns holding the light and climbing. Some of the areas are in the shadows and it is hard to see the holds. Another problem is while climbing up sand flakes off and a lot of times lands in your eye. By the time we both get to the top of the structure we realize that it is actually a lot taller than our initial impressions. Furthermore we see a few lights on the bottom near were started and we can vaguely hear what sounds like voices. Then a light flickers on and big flashlight appears shining up towards our direction. It moves around searing for a target. Casey and I both duck into some cover. It turned out we were climbing on top of someone’s house. The commotion and falling rock/debris woke them up. It must have been scary hearing two large men climbing on top of your house. Thus we decided to climb down and around the backside of the rock.



We continued to climbing up and around the main valley next to the road. The sandstone is white and it should be easy to see two figure climbing, but I guess no is looking or cares. The trail up to the base of the valley is really sanding and it’s a struggle to get stable non-sinking footing while trying to climb up. After what going about half way up we seen a large cone shaped building with lots of windows and doors. It was a really spooky and eerie looking structure. For some reason this environment reminded of the time Faheem thought it was a good idea to waste his free movie tickets to go see “The Cave” and I was waiting for one of scary looking underground creatures to climb out of one of the many windows on all fours while sticking to the walls. The good thing about this rock is that there is a narrow “U” shaft on one side where we can kind of Jet-Li your way up. Jet-Li is now a verb; Casey and I use it to describe when you have to put each foot on the opposite sides to slowly push your way up. So we each take turns Jet-Li-ing up this spooking looking rock.



At the top half the room is washed away from the weather exposes a really good panorama view of Cappadocia. The wall is cross-sectioned and on the other side is another room with a better view. So we have to bear hug that cross section of the wall, one foot on each floor of each room. It was stupid and scary move but the view was well worth it. Even when you consider that we I went over the wall, it crumbled and fell all the way to the bottom. Luckily with my cat like reflects I had already fallen forward and into the room I was trying to get to.

Our last campaign ended in defeat or I guess what some would call self preservation. We had ventured all the way up the valley to its peak. We were overlooking the entire rockscape. To one side was probably a 10foot decline (that was too steep to stop yourself on) before it dropped another good 40 to 50 feet straight down and on the other-side was just a straight down drop of 50-60 feet. Both sides fell into complete darkness and we couldn’t see the bottom. But at the top was stretch of narrow peak that if you were able to run across without falling to either side, you would get all the way up to the top of the valley. The peak felt pretty sandy and like a lot of the houses would probably have crumpled under our weight. Plus we had been on the top of the valley earlier that previous day and it would have take ages to get back because you wouldn’t have been able to descent the same way back down. After thinking about it doing short test footings for about half an hour we decided to call it a night. Besides we had already stayed up way passed the 1am call the Turkish police time that we agreed on with Jess.



On the way down we stop by the grape vineyard and got some fresh grapes. They were amazingly sweet and really annoying because the rest of our walk back our hands were sticky.

Cappadocia: Let's go climbing

I started to get a little restless and wanted to explore more Turkey. Coincidentally, I met two Seattleites, Casey and Jessica that were also about to depart Istanbul and check out more of what Turkey had to offer. We ended up booking the same itinerary through the travel agency next to our hostel through a guy named Vulcan.



We jumped on an overnight bus to Cappadocia. The buses here in Turkey have steward on board who serves free water, coffee and tea. The weird part is that they serve it in the middle of the night. During the late hours they run a loud annoying football game. The TV’s don’t get turned off until well into the morning. Even though the bus is empty we are not allowed to move seats since during stop at night they sometimes pick up more passengers. We arrive at the Cappadocia or specifically Goreme early in the morning. The first day is free for us explore.

Cappadocia is an inland part of Turkey has some old cave houses that have been in use as late as the early 90’s. These cave houses are networked by underground tunnels and are found scattered all over the valleys of Cappadocia.
This area is completely unprotected and we are free to explore over the entirety of the park unsupervised.



While exploring the networks of rooms carved into the earth we randomly ran into some friends of Casey and Jess. It was completely random and we ended up climbing and exploring the rest of the day with them. The rock valleys are sandstone and lot of it breaks off when climbing or just walking on it. It is amazing that all this is completely open and unprotected. Some of the rooms we find still have cave paintings in them. These paintings depict Christian icons. And since this area is now mostly Muslim the faces of saints are mostly scratched out.

The only remains of the large communities of houses are usually large room with door opening and windows. A lot of the times water has carved a room in half showing us a cross section view of the room. It seems that each house has a fireplace craved into one of the walls and recent soot shows that some people have still used it for burning timber. Some of the rooms contain a series of smaller nooks in a series. These were used to nest pigeons. Their dung was harvested for the curing of leather and hides.



There are tunnels that go underground and wind around the valley sometimes jumping above ground before dipping into the shadows again. The five of us are armed with two flash lights and blindly follow one another through these narrow passages. Sometimes there will be a section where the light shines in from a collapse and sometime the corridors deadend into a collapse. The entire experience was really exciting.



The second day we end joining the first of a two day organized tour of the area. We saw a lot of what we explored the previously. One of the stop was a city that was completely underground. The chambers were really small and the ceilings low. This underground city was used by Christians to hide from the Muslims. It was almost like exploring an ant hill. Christians must have been smaller back then because none of these rooms had ceilings high enough to stand in. Your backs are arched the entire time. That gets annoying really quick.



The rooms all still have the originally chisel marks on the walls. The consistency of the strikes and random nature of the markings almost makes it look like wallpaper. All the rooms are designed and created for a sole purpose. Like the modern day house each room has a different purpose. As for bathrooms they would dig a room, use it for a while and then collapse it. So there was a constant building and rebuilding process for this underground city. The most impressive view was from the top of one of the ventilation shafts. These shafts circulate warm and cool air. As you stick you head into the shaft to view below a shift breeze of cooled air rushes up from below. I couldn’t see the bottom of the shaft.