Tuesday, September 11, 2012

An Abbreviated Stay In Ten Sleep

As mentioned previously, back in 2009, Kevin "Rafscallion" Rafferty and I ventured off on a road trip that ended in Basin, WY with the vehicular harvesting of a mule deer.  On the road trip we had the bright idea of going to visit Yellowstone on the way out to British Columbia.  When driving through Ten Sleep, we were in awe of the amount of rock we could see on both side of the canyon, but didn't have a guide or any information on the climbing, so we decided to keep driving, but I think we both knew we would be back some day.

Seeing as we were basically recreating the first leg of our prior road trip, we decided to make a quick stop to sample the limestone that has been becoming more and more popular lately.  Here are a few things I noticed after our admittedly quite brief stint there:

  1. After climbing in the needles, the bolts are comically close together
  2. The best routes we did were all 5.12 or higher
  3. It is very high up, and the weather was awesome for climbing, even in the middle of August
  4. All of the cracks and ledges are full of bat shit
Ultimately, I was a bit disenchanted with the climbing there, especially after how much fun we'd had in the needles the last few days.  The scenery however was quite nice, especially at night.  At night, thousands of bats came down from the cliffs, and every night we thoroughly enjoyed watching them swooping around.  It was also apparently a meteor shower, and we saw a couple of incredible meteors, including one that Kevin saw that allegedly went from canyon rim to canyon rim.  I didn't see that one, but I did see a few others that were by far the biggest meteors I'd ever seen.  Very cool.

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