Bouldering, again!

So, as you can probably tell from the title up above, I went bouldering again. But before I start to talk about how very, very awesome the trip was, I'd like to preface it with an example of my stupidity and hard-headedness. Ooops, did that slip out? I meant, um, my genius and ever-present will to push myself. Yeah, that was it.

So, the post before last I told you that I climbed the vet tower and that it was really, really sharp. What I neglected to tell you, 'cuz I didn't want pity and/or lectures telling me how dumb I am, was that I shredded my body. Seriously, I left about six inches of Butko at the top of that building. What's even better, is that it was only two days away from my upcoming bouldering trip, which is not nearly enough time to grow back flesh. To an intelligent, malleable human being this simply means that they find something else to do that weekend. To me, it just meant that the climbs were going to hurt more.

And they did.

But before we get to that, a brief history of time, I mean, the area (I'm really lazy, so I'm going to just put a couple of pictures up describing it):

This comes from a photocopied guide that has been made up by Matt Natti so that climbers other than himself can go into the area and climb without him. If you think it's altruistic, it's really not, if you know climbers, you know that they just get sooo jazzed about rock that they're willing and ready to share any rock with anybody. I also had to pay 2$ for this, so altruism is dead. My favorite part, and I got this confirmed by Matt Natti, is the part that says they were hired to clear out the damage after the windstorm. It turns out that the damage "coincidentally coincided" with the exact trials that lead to climbable rock. It's strange how nature knows. . .

So I got up at the crack of dawn, 7:00, and hitched a ride with my awesome German friend Bastian (just like in the Neverending Story!) and we rode to Countdown where we met up with the other members of this little foray. We jaunted inside of Countdown, bought some groceries, closed the boots (trunks) of our 4 cars, and set off for the Blowhard Bush Reserve to scale some boulders. Bastian, Andy, and I talked for a ways, and about 2/3 of the way to the reserve, we all pulled over. Inquisitive, I walked up to the lead car and asked what was happening. It turns out that Claydon, one of the two guys who found this place, was lost. Luckily, Bastian is German, so he was prepared with a map and we continued onto the reserve.


Bastian, giving me his morning face.

Andy's morning face is significantly better.

So this is where we climbed the first day, the Troglodyte Wall and Cave area:

This area is rife with awesome, difficult climbs. They're mostly in the V-3 to V-6 range. If you're even partially a climber, then I don't have to say that I made it up about two climbs the first day. I'm blaming my shredded fingers. Yeah. It's all the fingers fault.

So we finished climbing after about 4 and a half hours and made our respective ways to the camping area for the night. In the twilight of the day Bastian and I set up the tent that his supervisor was kind enough to lend us for the night. I employed my usual skill with these kinds of things and it took about twice as long as it should have for us to put up the tent. From there I ate a couple of PB&J's, hung out around the barbecue pit that we turned into a bonfire, and talked with people from around the world till everybody else got too exhausted to talk anymore. So I went to bed too. Of course, by that I mean that I tossed and turned for most of the night, and finally ended up getting to sleep about an hour before it was time to wake up. Hooray for insomnia!

Anyways, I woke up the next day to find that the campground that we had been sleeping in was covered with a field of ice. Thankfully, I had a tent, so I woke up without a half-inch covering of hoar frost. This is a river that flowed right along our campsite. I though it was pretty, so here's a picture:I feel kinda sorry for the two people who decided to sleep out underneath the stars. But I feel really sorry for the cell phone that did it:

So from there we began our second day of climbing at the Devil's Seat area:

If you look really closely in this picture, you'll find Waldo, Matt Natti, sitting atop a boulder in the middle.

This is a picture of the surrounding countryside from atop one of the massive boulders that I scaled.

One of the boulders had a little cave underneath it that had a CARPET of cave Wetas. Needless to say, we put it to a vote, and we unanimously decided to not climb in that cave.

Luckily for me, this place was filled with climbs mostly at about the V-E to V-3 range. This effectively means that I could actually get a couple of climbs that day, which is a step up on the previous day's attempts. Again, the rock was really sharp, so I ended up putting holes in the holes on my hands. Whee and Hooray for not being able to hold a water bottle!

It was a better day of climbing for me, and I was content and happy when we finally gave up the climbing spirit to return to Dannevirk for some kebabs. There's two weird things in that sentence: Dannevirk and kebabs. Dannevirk prides itself on being a Viking Town. What? There's absolutely no way the vikings made it down this far, or this far inland. Do they think I'm an idiot? It's insulting. Oh, and kebabs are a delicious food that I want to bring back to the states. What's awesome though, is that in the Kiwi's quest to not incorporate any foreign words into their language (they call "baguettes" French Stick Bread), they pronounce it Kay-Babs, with the "babs" pronounced like "bags" with a b in place of the g. I giggle every time I hear it.

From there I returned to Massey University bruised, battered, and happy as could be. I washed these:

In rubbing alcohol, did the oh-mi-god-this-effing-stings dance, and slept for 14 hours. Ahhhhh, contentment.