Cragmama "Not all who wander are lost…" JRR Tolkien

Category Archives: North Carolina

2021 Reflections and 2022 Goals

2021 Reflections and 2022 Goals

Raise your hand if you like to geek out over climbing stats this time of year?!? I know I do. It’s fun to look back and see what I accomplished versus what I didn’t quite get to, and then use that information to make new goals for the next year. 2021 was a year of ups and downs for me. I sent a lot of routes that were meaningful to me, and also took almost all of the fall season to fail on something that also very meaningful to me. I was blessed to be able to get 48 days…Read the rest of this entry →

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Tweakend for the Weekend

Tweakend for the Weekend

“Mommy, what’s ‘bolt to bolting’ mean?” my 9 year old son asked me.  I hadn’t realized he had been listening to my conversation.  I was lounging at the base of the cliff, trying to summon the energy to give my project one last go before hiking out.  I was exhausted.  It had been a roller coaster of a day, hiking in to find ourselves in the midst of a foggy, misty drizzle that had made our slab warm-up a lot more exciting than we’d wanted.  Surprisingly enough, however, conditions on the 12 wall were primo.  The routes were steep enough…Read the rest of this entry →

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Spring: Here’s Where Things Stand.

Spring: Here’s Where Things Stand.

Spring climbing season is always a little more finicky than fall. The weather is more of a gamble, and conditions are decidedly better at the beginning of the season (when you’re at your weakest) versus the end (when you’re at your strongest.) This is the opposite of fall, when conditions are steadily improving at (hopefully) the same pace you are. That said, completing your spring projects before the summer heat sets in usually becomes a race against rapidly deteriorating conditions. This is typically the point in the spring where I realize there are so many good routes, and so little…Read the rest of this entry →

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Spring Has Sprung!

Spring Has Sprung!

I generally don’t write blog posts for a ho-hum day trip to Pilot Mountain.  Nothing personal against Pilot Mountain, it’s just that by this point, most of the lines there fall into one of three categories for me: done it and already written about it, done it but it’s not worth writing about, or still working on it with nothing new to report!   But this weekend I got to try a line that, for some reason or another, I’d skipped over back in the day when Pilot was among our regular weekend haunts.  It’s actually just an alternate start to…Read the rest of this entry →

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(Spry) Look, it’s Winter!

(Spry) Look, it’s Winter!

What do you do when climbing season goes straight from summer to winter?  Give up on the New River Gorge and follow the sun!  After yet another forecast of cold drizzle in Fayetteville, WV a couple of weekends ago, I got the green light from CragDaddy to make my own climbing plans.  A lot going on for him at work plus a minor knee injury meant his motivation was pretty low.  To take full advantage of flying solo, I decided to put out some feelers to see if anyone would be up for joining me at an area that is…Read the rest of this entry →

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“Not all who wander are lost.” —JRR TOLKIEN