Monday, May 16th, 2005

(Horse Shoe Canyon)

Kirstin and I decided to spend our last weekend in Missouri rock climbing at Horse Shoe Canyon and Sam's Throne... Arkansas.

Friday night thunderstorms came in, and as we huddled in our tent I counted 5 cells that came through. These were the the big thunderstorms that you hear about on tv every so often. Trees snapped in half, or just turned over with their roots lifted up out of the ground. I'm glad we weren't under one of those. Saturday afternoon the weather was beautiful, and Sunday was as good as anyone could ever ask for. Blue skies, cool temperature that kept you from sweating on the rock.

Kirstin got up a little bit earlier than me on Saturday and witnessed something pretty amusing. One of the reasons that Horse Shoe Canyon gets it name is because of the free roaming horses in the area, you just pitch your tent among them and watch where you step. Anyway, while she was getting things ready that morning (and I was still trying to avoid getting up) she saw two horses come up to another parties' tent and just start nudging it. It went something like this:

Nudge. "Stop it!" Nudge nudge. "Stop it guys! I mean it!" Nudge nudge nudge. Ziiiipp... !!!!!! (That's the sound of the person in the tent opening up his door to find a couple of horses looking right at him) Laughter from everyone else watching this

...

The last climb we went up on Sunday was named "Edge of Flight"- a really nice areté that has a hard boulder start to it. I ended up putting a top rope on it, since I would have had a pretty hard fall if I didn't make it to the first placement. That, and there was a black snake slithering around and I didn't really want to disturb it too much. Yea. It had nothing to do with the committing 20' moves.

Anyway, it was a good weekend, and a nice climb to end on. I'll have to tell my friend Jim Karpawitz about us ending with Edge of Flight, since he's one of the old farts from way back when Sam's Throne was just being discovered. He also happens to have the first ascent on Edge of Flight, so just don't tell him that I didn't lead it.

I did make sure to get a couple of the classics in- Poison Ivy and Boston Rag. If you ever get the chance to climb at Sams'- don't even think twice about it, you won't regret it. Sams' has always been my favorite place to climb anywhere. You can check out previous trips in here

-- posted 10:06 pm

Mmmm. Amaretto and Swiss Miss hot chocolate. A winning combination.