Bashing Bishop

Getting into the Bishop habit. Nights are cold, days are absolutely roasting, so no real rush to get out of bed. Bouldering takes it out of you in a different way than route climbing -- much more intense, so days are shorter. The Happy boulders are this volcanic stuff that lends itself to gymnastic, arm-sapping moves on large, but sharp holds, whereas the Butermilks are huge, egg-shaped granite boulders that requires more skill, crimping on sharpened Barclaycards, and friction for feet. These 'boulder problems' sometimes finish 45' above the (thankfully flat) landing. This is probably getting on for twice the height of the Bristol wall. A real man-boy sorter, to quote our Ken. We're all doing well -- I've managed my trip goal of V4 -- twice, in fact -- already, and Sarah's got several V3-s under her belt, coming close on V4, too. The Happies are the place for grade pushing, but situated at lower altitude, they're not that pleasent to climb on in the sveltering mid day heat. We ventured a bit further into the hills yesterday to the Pollen Grains boulders, even higher, but due to their remoteness, a real sense of solitude with snow capped mountains all around us.

We're resting today. The Pollen Grains took it out of us all, both skin-wise and muscle-wise. We've set up a slack line in the camp site wich amused us no end this morning. You can see how this can get addictive -- a weird combination of absolute concentration and total relaxation required. We're thinking of heading to the hot springs in Mammoth later on, as we've han little luck with the ones here in Bishop. More like luke-warm springs at the moment, the times we've tried.

I've finally come up with a decent way of uploading photos, so hopefully there should be a few appearing in a blog post near you. Bishop library has the decency of allowing free internet use, albeit 30 mins at a time.