cbear's blog

I'm probably late to the game, but I wanted to give kudos to Katie on her two page photo in the latest issue of Climbing mag. Very nice!!!!

I'm a little ashamed and embarrassed to admit this to a group of my peers but I feel that it is very important to help remind people to please stayed focused while climbing.

This past weekend I went sport climbing and when I got to the top of a route (just under 200 ft) I clipped a quickdraw to one of the rap bolts and cloved hitched myself to the draw. Since this climb was so high it required a double rope rapel to get back down. I started setting up the second rope that I'd been trailing up and once I got it ready I un-tied the climbing rope from my harness (since I wasn't focused I somehow thought the clove hitch was still holding me). I tied the two ropes together and when I tossed them down I noticed that there was nothing attaching me to the rap bolts, I was just standing on the ledge with no pro. First I mentally freaked out, followed quickly by calmly attaching my harness directly to the quickdraw. All total I was probably standing unprotected for about 20 - 30 seconds. If I would have thought this through I would have had attached a myself directly to the bolts and not used the rope in the equation, but I made a mistake.

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Maybe its just me, but I find the forum section on supertopo.com has a negative vibe to it. I've just been checking in to this site for about a month now and I will start off by stating that I have read some interesting some on some of the topics but I've also seen alot of negative postings. I've seen photos of horse crap and other user's name associated with it, racist slurs, and general hatred between community users being thrown back and forth. I also notice that a significant percentage of the posts have nothing to do with climb or other related items (tons lately have been political and I account that to the recent elections).

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Does anyone know about The Warrior Way mental training? (www.warriorsway.com) I see they have books, classes, seminars, etc. Has anyone taken/read any of this? It sounds interesting; especially building my mental strength when I'm on the sharp end of a climb.

Thoughts?

A buddy and I had planned a trip months in advance to climb Devils Tower. 3 days before we were about to leave we found out that the weather wasn't going to cooperate. We had already scheduled the time off from work and the last thing I wanted to do was to go back to work when I didn’t have to. So we started kicking around where to go with our long weekend. We decided to head out from Fort Collins CO to the western slope of Colorado to the Colorado National Monument. We had looked through some guide books and found a route called Otto’s Route (400ft, 5.8+, sandstone) that looked just right. Not to mention the weather in the area was calling for cool and sunny conditions.

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