Mill Bluff, near Camp Douglas, Wisconsin

[Pencil_Pusher]

Not really knowing where else this'd go, I'll put it in this shiny new forum.

I got rained out of climbing at the Gunks so went to Niagara Falls instead. Get there before 8am and you can avoid paying the parking fee! Hold on tight to the kids and pets because there's no last-chance safety wire to grab onto and the current is swift. Only about 150ft with a river pounding on top of you, if you take the plunge. Nice ice climbing in the winter though. The name "Bridal Veil Falls" stumped me as I thought I'd heard that here before too. Is there such a falls here???

But back on topic. Being a bit stumped at hauling all my climbing shit in a check-in bag and then getting rained out of the Gunks, I was all too happy to jump on this "rock" right off the interstate. There sure was a lot of beach sand all over the dang place and I thought maybe that was a way to keep climbers from climbing this thing. Little did I know the whole thing was made out of beach sand. So I made my first go at solo roped climbing. Probably the biggest problem I had was not taking the rope with me and thereby having to figure out which was the free end and which to clip the pro to. Nevermind about the pro holding in such "rock". That's just a minor technicality

I found myself not commiting to moves unless I was sure I could reverse them and I didn't much like the consistent fall-distance potential due to lack of a soloist device. Instead it was two clove hitches on two lockers although the way I used them, I should've used figure eights on a bite instead. I used a chest harness for all but the last part, when I needed a long sling. The anchor was a tree and I did manage to traverse a ledge with other trees, so there was some solid protection. I didn't stand on the summit because it was a bit exposed and the sand/rock was a bit more crumbly up there. The whole thing was almost exactly a rope length long. No real route, I just picked an easy one and meandered my way up. Others had been up there many a time, it looked like with the etched graffiti. Without a rope no doubt, but that's not me. I left a green sling on a tree to clean the hard part on rappel. Someone that doesn't mind the exposure nor sometimes crumbly hold, could free solo up this no problem.

Had I planned ahead, I would've asked Carolyn to go climbing as I passed through her state. From the western edge of North Dakota and all the way to Spokane there was nary a blue sky to be found. The whole way across Montana, on the interstate, there was smoke in the sky and all over the place. Another motorist said South Dakota was the same way... wow. That's a butt-load of smoke considering the I-90/94 distance was around 700 miles through Montana.

I stopped by the EMS shop in Lebanon, VT, looking for any info on local climbing areas. Two employees said "Rumney" although neither of them had a clue where that was. A cool thing I saw there were those Mammut butt-floss runners that make the spectra ones seem big. Mo' money, mo' money.