Warmth in Chatt-town!

Hey everyone! I decided to post again because I have some pictures now.Things have been going really well until just recently until we all got sick except Kirk. Hopefully he can manage to stay well! So far I've gotten off the easiest, and I keep hoping it won't get worse. Micah got the worst of it, with a peak temperature of 104 degrees! He's doing a lot better now, though, just a low grade fever and a bad cold.

Since the last time I posted, we've done a lot of climbing. I keep feeling really weak on the rock, and when we went to Leda, a sport climbing area, my concerns were justified when I fell all the way up a 5.10. On the other hand, it was fairly overhanging, and my endurance isn't what it used to be because we've been almost solely bouldering. A couple days later, a flashed a 5.10, so I'm feeling better about my climbing skillz now. We don't have any pictures of rope climbing, unfortunately, but I found a picture on the internet of a 4 star classic crack at T-Wall. It's called "goldenlocks", 5.8+. I thought it was pretty hard for a 5.8!

We did a 5.10a next to it called "Cakewalk". It was so much fun! I decided to try and be artsy while we were there, so I took some pictures of the unbelivably green grass patches that were up there. They're not spetacular pictures, but the green is a crazy contrast to the normal bland colors of February.

We also went to Rocktown for a day. I didn't get too many photos, but here's one. It's Micah on "Golden Harvest", V10. The climb was named well, because the boulder is a perfect golden color, with patches of red. It was amazing!

And last but not least, some pictures on Micah and Toby at LRC. If you can tell which are Micah and which are Toby, I'll give you a heart, made with my hands. :)

So there's the pictures! Not too many, I know. Hopefully we'll do better once we stop being sick and start climbing again.

In other news, we went to the bouldering gym here one night and had a blast climbing there. Then, we found out that the next evening there was a competition! We had been climbing the comp problems all night, but the employee said that we could climb in the comp anyway. So we showed up the next evening for the comp. It was a pretty fun comp. You paid $10. $5 went to the gym, and the other $5 went into a pot for each category (beginner M, beginner F, intermediate M/F, etc., so the more people in your category, the more $ the winner got) They divided all their problems up into categories. Green-taped problems were beginner, yellow intermediate, blue advanced, and black was open. You could only climb the problems in your category and the one directly below it (so Toby, who was in advanced, could not climb any of the green problems). The scoring system was very unique. Each hold on the problem was worth 10 pts. for green, 20 for yellow, 30 and 40 for blue and black respectively. So, if there are 5 holds on a green problem, and you fall off before hitting the top hold (you got through 4 holds), you can still count it as 40 pts. It kind of makes a natural grade curve, because the harder the problem, the less holds it has (for the most part). The other crazy rule was that if you flash the problem (get to the top first go), you get 50 pts. extra! That meant that if I flashed a really easy green problem, I could easily get more points than if I worked really hard on a difficult yellow problem. Once I figured this out, I felt pretty good about my chances at winning female intermediate.
When they tallied up the scores, they realized that there weren't enough intermediate girls to have their own category, so we were put in with the boys. Even though that happened I still won! And, because there were more people in my category than any other, I won $55! The winner of Open (the hardest category), got $20. Needless to say, I loved that comp!

I love you all!
-Stella
PS - sorry all the pictures are so weird!