con-Graduations

One more off deck. Ian pressed through his graduation ceremony this weekend to finally actually be done with school. although he actually finished at semester, he can now share the short feeling of freedom that you attain when you accomplish something so major and yet so small at the same time. He is planing on crushing all the boulders around RMNP with James until the snow drives them out of town. On to Texas they'll roll, 3 months in the Tanks, and then who knows which way the wind will blow. Nationals? Worlds? Bishop?... school?... haha... Not, just go climbing.

Sray-cut-Spray

For a little more then a month now I'v been living out of the back of my car working up in Laramie, WY for Tiger Tree Land Management. Attempting to get a handle on the Western Pine Bark Beetle infestation that has spread to epidemic levels in the past years of drought and fire prevention, we cut and clear infested areas and spray healthy trees to prevent infestation. The insecticide we spray is non-harmful to mammals but decimates aquatic life all most instantly. So incidentally we are unable to save trees that chose the easy life and grew near any active water source. We work basically on an on-call schedule, or you could say, we work when its not windy, raining, freezing, or to much snow on the ground, but you must remember, this is Wyoming. Sometimes it seems like we would get better coverage if we stood in Utah and sprayed up in the air. My crew, the Green Sprayers, is made up of a great group of people, and we have a great time working together. Although right now were all spread out trying to get the U-dub campus sprayed. Lavaughn, our truck (the 550) supervisor from Utah is on his second summer with TTLM, and has worked in Alaska at a fish plant and in the oil fields around Wyoming, Funny dude, its awesome. Jeremy, from Tennessee got hired on the same time as me. He was in the Navy as a Coreman for seven years and has wife and two daughters, and being in the military he has more stories then you can shake a stick at. I'm probably going to laugh a few more years on to my life working with him. Rosanne, from Organ and the only girl on the working side of the business. She worked on the fire crew up in Organ for three summers and then did something for Verizon Wireless down in SoCal for a while, decided that California isn't for everyone and moved to the one and only great city of Fort Collins where she is in the process of trying to go to school. And of course Me, and i love my my job.

Orange'n in Joe'sville

If you were a dog Joe's Vally Utah would be like a street lined with so many of the most amazing firehiderents that you would die before you were finished with all of them. But seriously there is so many boulders, you could never scope out all of them.

After a quick oil change James and I start lay'n rubber on the pavement, we were on our way...Welcome to Orangeville... in just over 8 hours. I don't really remember what happened the first night, but we woke up the next day and proceeded to climb stone. Upon returning to camp that night we discovered that some other people had taken a liking to our encampment. Tom and Jenna where their names and from New Mexico they came. It was their first time in Joe's so we teamed up to crush together. Tom had the strength of the Temple behind and pulled down some good sends in the time he had. Jenna pulled down hard too, she did the sit to 3 weeks,but just hung out most of the time. The weather for the first week was pretty consistent, nice days, cold windy nights. We managed through it and found a perfect little wind shelter to have fires at night.

Rest days consisted of climbing eventually, no matter how hard you try you climb something sometime, unless you let your buddy take your car with your climbing stuff in it, lock yourself in your tent and read, go look for new boulders and/or wood, then watch some low-cals scramble over for New Joe's into the Right Fork.

The best day was a simi-rest day for myself. It started with shooting pics and video of the Evil Resident in Area 51, which had many suters but no senders (until this Ryan guy tried, good work Ryan). I did have a plan to send Big Boy, but i had tried it so many times already i had a mental block per'say. I knew i could do all the moves but if I fell I would get this negativeness that prohibited me from sending. So I just waited till I couldn't any more, took some agro fuel and... YA! sent. Then James started to try Two Finger and sent out of the blue. It was so sudden that I didn't even push record on the camera, I just pointed it at him and cheered him on (whoops).

Back to the New Mexicans, a bunch more showed up to meet up with T&J. Ciris, Spenser...

I think... I cant remember there names but there was three of them and one beautiful model from the NYC who's name was Ava. Their trip was kind of shat upon by the mormenized gov, but after a couple days they were phyced again and climbed hard. We never really got to exchange farewells but I assume that they all made it home safe.

James also had to fall back to the home front at the end of the week. So on Sunday we got him all packed up and he flew home in record time. I on the other hand was staying for another week, and the night James left was one of the most epic wind battles I have ever fought. Basically my rain fly blew off, my tent, being only weighed down by me, then started to blow across the ground releasing the tarp that was under the tent into the wind as well, the poles splintered under the unrelenting wind, and that's the night that HE showed up. But i got it all back together, in a way, and got through the rest of the trip just fine.

Oh! and I forgot my sleeping bag?