Thursday, April 24, 2008

Play by Play

Hey there one and all!
So I thought I'd give you guys a run down of what's been shaking down here in the NZ.

So I've been in Castle Hill New Zealand about 45 days now. Climbing two days on one day off.
When I first got here I was amazed with the amount of rock I could see. It surrounds you as you sit in the center of the Castle Hill Valley. What I didn't know having never climbed on limestone before is that it doesn't make for a lot of holds. So there maybe 15000 boulders. But 90% of them are blank or short little mantles. But and this is a big but there all is a whole lot of world class problems as well. There just not as close to one another as one would hope for.

I landed here and my good buddy Pete picked me up at the airport and we drove the hour and half drive to the boulders. As we rolled into Spittle Hill the sun was setting and I was psyched! It's so beautiful it's crazy. It's like Lord of the Rings! But it was also to dark to go walk around so I had to save it for the next day.

The next day we headed into Spittle Hill the closest of all the areas. And got straight to work. What I learned right away that the rings and dips I'd been doing for the last 4 months didn't help with the slick feet. The wind or just the number of people climbing here has made for some scary polished feet. So no amount of upper body strength is going to help when you press up into a slab. But I managed a couple problems.
So the next day we picked up Tim.

I'm getting kicked off the computer right so I'll finish this later needless to say I am awesome and I climbed all my projects and had a wonderful time.

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