December 30th, 2017
Wednesday I flew back in from spending Christmas with family in Texas and after two grueling days of life in civilization I was ready to get out again. Fortunately that following weekend was a three day work holiday thanks to New Years and after some slightly harried planning I settled on a return to the Tucson area.
A few years back Jen Blackie, Jeff Atijera, and I did a New Years trip out there that had included caving, technical climbing, and even a facial assault by a skunk. It was awesome except for that last part and the shots Jeff had to get to his face. Beyond that the only other bummer was that we weren't able to summit Elephant Head due to route finding issues and an extended attempt to make something marginal work so I'd always wanted to go back.
Also since it's -ish in the area I wanted to add in one of the technical routes on Baboquivari since I'd heard it was an amazing climb. Unfortunately due to the painfully long drives involved it's difficult to combine those two effectively with limited vacation days.
In the end we settled on driving out Friday night, not getting a lot of sleep, climbing Elephant's Dome on Saturday since it should have been an easier day, doing Baboquivari from the east the following day, and then if everything went well setting up for Elephant Head Sunday followed by a long drive home. And hopefully not getting attacked by any skunks or drug runners.
It was an aggressive plan and things started going wrong also immediately when Kristen Lindbergh had to drop out due to some issued likely related to her unfortunate habit of consuming the flesh of innocent fish leaving just Jen and I leaving Friday night.
- Posted By: Matthew Hengst
- 0 Comments