Learning Spanish

People from all over the world work in food service at the Y. One of the biggest contingents is from Columbia, although there are a bunch of people from Turkey, and even one from Kazakhstan among other countries.

Their proficiency in english varies a lot. One of my friends, Luis, speaks exceptional english. I was talking to him about Hemingway and described his writing style as "terse", and then realized that he might not know that word. He did - but another American kid who we were also talking to didn't. (Luis didn't know the world clown though, so I guess it balances out.)

Some of my Columbian co-workers barley spoke a word of english on the other hand when they arrived so I've been learning some spanish. It's really similar to french, which I studied in school, so that helps a lot. Many of the roots are the same, and the basic structure of the grammar is almost identical.

Some of what I've learned has been just phrases, but I'm actually starting to learn the building blocks as well. I'm definitely learning it a lot faster than I ever learned french, but I guess that makes sense because I never spent almost half the day trying to speak french.

A lot of the words (palabras en espangol) I've learned are specifically suited to the work we're doing (to vacuum = aspirar, clean = limpiar, floor = piso, table = mesa, etc), but hopefully by the end of the summer I'll have a more general, if elementary, knowledge of spanish.

I'm pretty excited.

I also started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Columbian. I think Orhan Pamuk's "Snow" is next on my list, but I'll have to go into town and join the public library there to check it out.

Destroyer

I haven't written about any sport climbing yet, which is kind of a shame because I do more of it than trad. One nice thing about climbing in the Estes Park Valley is that both types of climbing coexist; in some places there is a lot of tension between the two "camps" of climbers.
In Connecticut, for instance, there is no sport climbing at all, due in large part to a single individual who likes to the chop fixed protection necessary to sport climb with bolt cutters.
But out here, I guess people are a little more laid back. Today I climbed with Drew at a little crag just a mile or so from the YMCA property. It hosts less than a dozen routes, some of which are sport, some trad, and some a mix of the two.

Today, Drew and I ate an early dinner and headed out for Cottontail Crag. The weather didn't look to promising, as the sky was dark and it was starting to rain. In fact, as we pulled out of the parking lot in Drew's car we even heard some some thunder. But we knew better than to turn around - the dark clouds and rain usually disappear almost as suddenly as they appear out here.
So we headed out, and began the ten or fifteen minute hike up to Cottontail in the rain, and by the time we got to the crag, it had cleared up. It was still dark over most of the sky, but some blue sky was poking out around the edges and the rain was totally gone.
We had decided to go to Cottontail today for pretty much one route, "Destroyer". It's rated 5.12a, and is the hardest (maybe 2nd hardest) route I've tried to date. The difficult section involves using some pretty small holds and balancy body positions. I finished it, all the way with no falls on my fourth try of the evening, and was really excited. Drew is really close to getting it. I bet he'll "send" on his next trip out there, which will probably be in the next few days. In the mean time I'll have to find a new project.

Osiris

This morning Drew and I left for Lumpy at 7:30 in the morning (and had a lot better luck with the weather) to do Osiris on the "Pages Wall" of The Book on Lumpy Ridge.

The rock was really interesting - I wish I knew more about geology. Shallow, flaring cracks ran up most of the wall, which from a distance look remarkably like pages of a book. Sometimes flaring cracks can be difficult to protect, but fortunately we didn't have that problem - the climbing was hard enough. The first pitch, rated 5.6 or 5.7, which is normally not that hard, was 140 feet of some of the most strenuous climbing I've done. It was a sort of chimney with lots of grunting and groaning moves required.

I really wish I'd brought a camera because I had some amazing views of Drew starting the fourth pitch, just above fang ledge. The aformentioned fang is a thin spire leaning against the wall which you climb up to start the pitch. It comes after a short traverse, so I had a great view as he pulled onto the route with blue sky in the background and tons of exposure. I felt like it would have gone well on the cover of a climbing magazine.

It turned out to be a pretty long day because we took a wrong turn on the descent and thus had to hike back UP a substantial amount to retrieve our packs from the base of the climb, so we missed lunch. I guess we would have missed lunch anyways since we topped out at 12:50pm. It took us about 3 and a half hours to do five pitches... I guess we'll get faster as we refine our technique.

Check out this link for some pretty descriptive pictures of the climb.

Books

When I can't climb I try to read. I try for books, and the Times on the internet. Sometimes I spend too much time on email and stuff like this though.


One of my roommates brought a lot of books from a philosophy class, so I read some of those. I got 86 pages into Plato's Republic a few weeks ago - I should probably finish it. It was quite good until around the 85th page, so it will probably get good again soon. He also had the Communist Manefisto, which at 120 pages took only the smaller half of an afternoon to read. It peaked my interest in Marx, and I'd like to read Das Kapital now.

We have a library at the YMCA, but it's not very big. I went in for the first time with hope to check out Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" (I figured it'd be... appropriate) and Dawkins' "The God Delusion". I guess Nickel and Dimed was too obscure and Dawkins too anti-christian for the YMCA to stock. I came out with Susan Sontag's "In America" and Jack Kerouac's "On The Road".


"In America" was absolutely fantastic. Probably the best book I've read on my own accord without it being assigned to be for school (many of those books have been really good as well). I couldn't, however, really get into "On The Road". I turned it back in instead of renewing it at checked out "A Farewell to Arms" by Hemmingway. Its also really good, and a little easier to understand it in subtlety than "The Sun Also Rises" (read for school a few years ago), which is appreciated. Maybe I'll make this a summer of reading the classics. I think I'll get "East of Eden" next, though sugestions would be appreciated (I think this whole blog thing will let you do comments).

Work

While I came out here mostly to climb, I seem to spend a lot of time working. Uggh. The DMM slogan is "Climb now, work later", but sometimes I feel like I'm doing more of the converse.

I work five days a week, eight hours a day, and make $4.50/hr before taxes with food and housing as bonuses at the YMCA of the Rockies, Estes Park Center, in food service. I used to spend my shifts mostly in the dish room, but within the last few days I've been transfered to the walnut dining room.

The walnut room has a capacity of about 250 and usually serves conferences or conventions, though apparently we do weddings and stuff like that sometimes. Last week we had a convention of kids with cochlear implants and their families, and this week we have a conference of doctors. We usually have between 2 (like yesterday) and 6 (the day before) staff to run the place, which amounts mostly to "preparing" cold foods, cleaning, fetching more bowls and silverware and the like, cleaning, and cleaning.

I put the word preparing in quotes because usually it amounts to finding a box of premade food, 80-90% of the time made by Sysco, the food service giant, and putting it in a pan. I think the food we serve (and get served ourselves as part of our pay) is pretty gross, but some of the guests seem to enjoy it because I usually get one or two positive comments a day.

The two shifts each day are 6:00am-2:30pm and 12:30pm-9:00pm. My schedule is a mix of the two. The morning shift leaves time to go climbing after work. Usually the plan is to eat an early dinner around 5:00pm or so and then sport climb till dark. So far, I haven't really done anything exciting during the mornings before any of my afternoon shifts, but I'm hoping to change that. The weather is generally better in the mornings, but its just a matter of getting a partner to wake up and go.

Tomorrow is payday, so that's pretty exciting. I won't really get much money (~$300 for 80 hours after taxes) by normal people standards, but for me its enough because I don't have any substantial expenses. I plan to spend most of it on climbing gear.

White Whale

Today was my first day off from work in a while, so I was pretty excited to spend the day the climbing. Unfortunately, no one else was off in the morning so we just went climbing in the afternoon, once my regular partner Drew got off work at 2:30.
Drew is a senior in college at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal. During the year he works at the climbing gym there. He's majoring in technology education and will be doing his student teaching next fall. Within the last few months, he bought a full rack of trad climbing gear, so he's a good guy to climbing with.
Today was our third time at Lumpy Ridge (the main trad area around here) together. In the last few weeks we've climbed Batman and Robin, 5.6 and Magical Chrome Plated Semi-Automatic Enema Syringe, 5.7.

We had planned to do this climb yesterday but subsequently backed out because weather hadn't looked to promising. However, the predicted bad weather never came so we felt kind of stupid. So today, even though the weather didn't look too good again, we decided to just go for it. From the YMCA campus the sky looked pretty bad to the south, but to the north, the direction of Lumpy Ridge, the sky was peeking through the clouds.
The approach to White Whale, on the Left Book, was pretty long, and it misted a little along the trail. We were pretty concerned that we would get rained out, but decided to make the call at the base of the climb. Another group was at the base, and fortunately they had just gotten down. We also saw two guys freesoling a route just to the left, which was kind of scary to watch.
The route is three pitches, and rated 5.7. I led the first pitch to a belay at a tree. As Drew was cleaning, the weather closed in and it started hailing. Fortunately it stopped pretty quick, but I was still pretty cold in my cotton t-shirt. Drew was carying the rain jackets in his pack, so we both had to endure the rain untill we got to the belay. We considered rapping off the tree and retreating, but the hail stopped so we figured it would be easier to just finish the route. The climbing was really high quality, but the wind was blowing the whole time so we tried to move fast. Drew said that if his helmet didn't have a chin strap, it would have blown off.
We finished up the climb at 6:00, which left only an hour to get back to the Y before dinner closed, so we ran down the approach. Going downhill was fun but once we hit level ground it was just hard, especially considering that we were both carrying packs. Fortunately we made it back in time for dinner, so I guess all the panting was worth it.

Tomorrow we're off again to another Lumpy Ridge route in the morning (when the good weather is), so I expect it to be a little less "epic". All in all we really lucked out with the weather because of how much worse it could have been.

Making a blog?!

So, I used to think that blogs were a new age construct that were kind of self-important. But, nonetheless, here I am starting a blog. I got the idea from overhearing two other people talking about blogs, and I think it's a good idea for a few reasons.
I wanted to communicate what I was up to this summer, and had been doing it by email. A blog will, I think, be a little easier for a few reasons. First of all, I feel a little imposing flooding people's inboxes with mass emails. With a blog, if you're not interested then you don't have to read it, no harm - no foul. It's also very easy to share a blog with others - all it takes is sharing the URL address.
So, I guess here it goes. Welcome to my blog. (That still feels awkward to write)