WOODS in the woods

WOODS came to visit on spring break. There were at least 20 people, which can always make things a bit stressful, but I had a fantastic time! Micah, Toby, and I camped out at Foster Falls with the WOODSians, and even got a free trip to Horse Pens 40 out of the deal (not to mention some really good meals)!

Anyway, here's some pictures (none of them are mine. They are all taken from Evan and Tyler's amazing cameras, and there are SO many good ones!).

Anyway, this probably shows half the people that were there...

This first pic. is from a cool stream near the AT and a white water rafting place. I didn't go, but everyone said they had a blast!
HP40 fun!
Ambdizzle in a sea of slopers
This boulder is called the Turtle Head Boulder. I'm kissing the turtle.
A backpacking trip. The rhododendron tunnel is so cool!

Matthew is from Jamaica. For us it was warm here, but I don't think he felt as warm as the rest of us...
The dictator of WOODS - Emily! Here she is giving you a taste of her climbing style - smooth and flowing. It's always beautiful to watch her climb.
you might not be able to see it, but they're all reading


I thought I'd keep this one short, but maybe I'll add more pictures of my own later. I love you all.
-Stella

A short movie

This is at the Landlord Boulders (that's what we decided to call our landlord's boulders...).

I was trying to make the music go with the movie really well. Please let me know what you think!

-Stella

A post of warm weather

This last weekend was wonderful! We went down to Horse Pens 40 in Alabama for Sloperfest, which is an outdoor bouldering competition and local music festival. We didn't get any pictures, even though I brought the camera to make sure I would have pics for this post.

Micah and Toby didn't want to pay the $$ to compete, so they were just spectators (aka, they paid the normal amount for a weekend stay at HP40 and they got to hear some awesome music and catch some free stuff thrown into the crowd). I paid $45 to compete. I got about $15 back with the sweet t-shirt I got for competing, and $4 more back for the Climbing Magazine issue I got. I also got lots of stickers and some other weird stuff (like a little box of Curves for Women brand cereal).

The comp was a climb-everything-that-you-possibly-can-during-the-comp format. Every climb you did was added up into your score. I entered beginner (Horse Pens is SUPER sandbagged, which means that the hardest climbs I have done there are V2! It kind of sucks to have to enter beginner when I've been climbing for 4 years). Toby's done this comp format before, and both he and Micah advised me to just do as many problems as I could. It's better strategy to do 10 V0s than 3 V2s. Only try a problem once or twice before moving on.

I added up my score at the end, and with 32 total problems (at least tripling the amount of problems I've ever done in a day before) I had 4400 points. During the awards ceremony, I found out that I won by 2000 points! The girls in 2nd and 3rd must not have known the strategy for getting a lot of points. They each did about 10 V2s, while I did 30 V0s (well, I did some V1s and 2s also).

For my troubles, I got some crazy thin finger-tip skin, sore shoulders, and a free pair of La Sportiva shoes of my choice.

The warm weather part comes in because it was 65 and sunny Sat., 69 and sunny today, and it will be 72 and partly cloudy tomorrow. I hope it continues this way!!

Micah made a video of this weekend, but we were all so busy climbing during the comp, that this is all footage from today (Sun.). We all climbed so much this weekend, that the video is only of Toby, who was the only one out of us man enough to keep climbing today...
HP video


also, Micah made another short video a while ago with some random climbing in it. It's a good one. It includes LRC, a random creekside area that's really cool, and our landlord's awesome boulderfield. Here's a link to that one:
Cool video

Next week is Wooster's spring break, and WOODS will come down for 2 weeks. I'm so psyched! Micah's dad is coming the middle weekend of WOODS being here, and his mom is coming the weekend after. So many visitors this month! It looks like it will be a good one!

-Stella

Is this one working right?

I'm just getting rid of the old post, but check out the end. There's a short movie I made and some pictures.



And here's some other things:

Toby fell off Micah's skateboard at about 20mph. This is his bruise/hematoma


Our landlord, Andy, said he had some property with rocks on it. Normally when people say that, they take you there and show you shale or something that you can't climb on. But not Andy. He's got a lot of super high quality rock. Perfect boulders to perfect 90 ft. cliffline. Here's the view from his house. His wife told us that some of their friends have seen the view and said it was the best in Chattanooga. It was really damn good!
And here's a small video we put together of the first FA done on Andy's property! It's a V3/V4 - the mantle's easier if you're short! I called it The Distance - it's not too long, but it's a lip traverse, so it doesn't go straight up. I thought it would be longer when I first looked at it.

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!

life has been very laid back

Hello everyone! Here's a brief overview of what's happened since PA:
1. Drove to Chatt. and spent 2 days apartment hunting. The first day led to such great un-success that we all went to bed feeling entirely hopeless (also we were under a pavilion and it was thunderstorming). The second day looked brighter when a landlord called us to report that a lady who had claimed one of his apts. still hadn't contacted him. He said that if she didn't call by 1pm today, we could have it. We went and looked at it, and it was awesome! A split level, where each level was a different room (1st floor: living room. 2nd floor: kitchen. 3rd floor: bedroom, bathroom, closet). 1pm rolled around, and the apt. (well, duplex, actually) became ours. On top of that, we met a guy from the New named Kirk, and he moved in with us, thus lowering the price of our new home. Our neighbor (other half of duplex) is cool too. He's a musician and followed the Grateful Dead for a bit.
2. we spent the first 4 days w/out water
3. As soon as we moved in, it became cold. Not as cold as OH, but highs have been in the 40s mostly, with some days in the 30s. I have been to Rocktown twice, and LRC (Little Rock City) 3 or 4 times. I've actually climbed about twice. Oh, and the gym once. Today, Micah and I are going to hike up to T-Wall to check out the cracks. I've got some projects planned for LRC, but they're all V7 and I still haven't sent a V4 there.
4. I applied to work as a stockboy in an organic foods store, but haven't heard back yet. My next plan is to apply to the TN Aquarium. It's $20 a person to see it, which I'm not paying, so hopefully I can see it for free this way.
5. We haven't taken a single picture yet. I'm not sure why.
6. We now have a library card. It was difficult to obtain, and it still costs money to borrow most items.

That's the overall story. Oh, my friend from Kendall Cliffs, Jared came to visit. He moved to CO then NC, and came down. It was really nice to see someone from OH (originally).

I love and miss you all.
-Stella
PS: HAPPY BIRTHDAY CATHERINE!!

Pennsylvania

Hey all! I'm not sure if anyone's reading this anymore, but I'm going to keep updating it anyway. Now we're in PA at Micah's house. Things are really different here than they are in OH. First off, due to not being my parents, Micah's family isn't as good at cooking my favorite meals (but they still do a fantastic job). Second, there's babies around all the time! Micah's mom runs a daycare, so during the day there's 6 month olds - 5 year olds running (or, in the 6 month old's case, laying) around. It's kind of fantastic, especially when Micah wakes me up in the mornings with a baby to play with. :) There's a lot more hiking and climbing around here, so we're outside a lot (except the past couple days have been too cold for me, so Micah and Toby have gone out without me).

As for hiking, I've already been on the AT tons of times! We hiked up to Hawk Rock - a sweet overlook - and that was on the AT, then we met up with Tony D - who I first met in Flagstaff, but he's here visiting - at a climbing area. Toby showed me a cool boulder problem that had a huge white paint splotch on it. It didn't take me to long to realize we were on the AT again! And, of course, the AT goes right through Micah's town, so we drive on the AT almost everyday.

Micah's stepmom took some Hawk Rock pictures of us, but we don't have them yet.

The climbing here is pretty amazing. Obviously you can see more by visiting chetroy.com, but here's some pics we took in the last week:
Isn't this rock cool? And there's so many different kinds of rock! Besides this conglomerate, there's Gniess, Schist, Diabase (technically granite-like, but doesn't climb anything like granite. Also, note that 3 or 4 places around Harrisburg are Diabase, as well as a place in NJ. Those are the only two known outcroppings of it in the climbing world), sandstone, just plain white quartz like you see in people's yards, except big enough to climb on, and tons of rock that no one knows what kind of rock it is!Micah's toproping! Ahaha! Make sure to laugh at him when you see him. Sorry the picture's sideways! But this is still Boxcar Rocks, the conglomerate rock.
This is Savannah. She's Micah's niece. She's a freaking cool 5 year old. She came out to climb with us that day. It was cool, because she made up and sent her own boulder problem. I sent it too. I put my foot on top, and stepped up. It's nice to be so much taller than someone. This rock, we think, was gneiss with quartz veins running through it. Cool!

Okay, that's all for now. We'll hopfully be leaving within a week for Chattanooga! Wish us luck finding an apartment!
Love,
Stella