Author: Pete

Spring looks like it is upon us.  A forecast of mid-forties for the next week at least kind of lends credence to my claim at least.  Of course there is always the chance of the late season snow storm (remember mid -May 2002?). 

 

So since the nice weather has started to descend my buddies Mike D and Jesse went out for a little climbing today at Cat’s Hole in Meriden.  This place is actually less than 10 miles from their house.  We were accompanied with some friends of Mike and Jesse’s roommate, Mark.  We set two ropes up and Mike and Brian gave some lead a try.  Unfortunately the easier climb to lead on was super dirty and wasn’t really that good.  The other three routes (two off one rope) were fun.  There was a 5.8 called Pegasus I think.  I wasn’t thrilled with it until the top were it became a bit more fun.  The other route I climbed was a 5.10 called One Million Dead Dogs, uplifting name, eh?  Quote of the day, “razor crimps”, by Mike D on his description of OMDD.

 

I was really disappointed at the setup of the wall as it relates to photography.  The two ropes had no line of sight between them.  It turns out this wasn’t all bad because I totally spaced on bringing my nice new camera harness.  Oh well there is always next time.  Until then enjoy what I was able to get from the ground.

Greg Thompson, Mike Steidley and I went up to North Kingston, RI for some riding.  Though the weather was relatively warm it wasn’t great, cloudy and windy were the main problems.  Despite that it was good day of riding.  Pictures here.

Dave Forsberg, Steve Poulin and I went out to Kent, CT to hike a little of the Appalachian Trail.  It was a good hike overall.  The weather was good but things were a little slippery.  It looked like at lower elevations some precipitation we got a few days before was all rain and then froze.  At higher elevations it was all snow.  This made for a slippery beginning and end of the hike.  Pictures here.

With the amazingly and freakishly warm weather we’ve been having I went climbing along with Mike D, Jesse, Irene and John. None of us had been to this place before and it certainly showed.

After walking in on the trail we decided it would be quicker to cut through the woods to the base of the cliff. After navigating a scree field for 15 minutes we got to the base where a larger group of climbers told us we could go up a ravine to get to the top. It was questionable if we should have been climbing the ravine without some kind of protection not to mention all the gear we had on our backs. We finally got up this and the next “pitch” of the ravine by spacing people along it and moving bags up to the next person and by dropping a rope and hauling the bags up. John decided to go farther down and did find a better ravine and nearly beat us to the top. Irene and I, well mainly Irene while I watched, set two ropes, one on Thor’s Hammer and another next to it, while Mike and Jesse hiked to the bottom again.

The sun was quickly setting as Irene and Mike climbed. Given that we had to top out to get out and because the sun was setting I decided not to climb. This turned out alright because I got some good photos.

Overall I would say this felt less like a climbing experience and more like a survival one.

Go to the gallery for the pictures.

The gallery contains just about all my photography since I started digitizing it.  Well not all of it, but much of the stuff that I deemed worthy of posting.  If you looked at my work chronologically you'll see that I've gone for a quality versus quantity approach.  Older stuff has more pictures but generally not as good quality.  Newer stuff is the opposite.

 

In the 10 years I've been doing photography in earnest I've moved, copied and generally monkied around with many of the files so the date on a vast number of them is not correct.  Don't pay much attention to the date of most stuff unless it is after 1/1/2007. 

 

You can search my entire site for keywords to find images.  I'm going to make a sincere effort to fill the metadata for all my photographs from now on which will help with this.  This will be more prevalent as time goes on, but it does work right now.